Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT: 1840-1922

[, Elliott & Fry ]

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

WILFRID SCAWEN
BLUNT
i 840 — 1922

by

EDITH FINCH

JONATHAN CAPE
THIRTY BEDFORD SQUARE
LONDON

FIRST PUBLISHED I938

JONATHAN CAPE LTD. 30 BEDFORD SQUARE, LONDON
AND 9I WELLINGTON STREET WEST, TORONTO

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN THE CITY OF OXFORD
AT THE ALDEN PRESS

PAPER MADE BY JOHN DICKINSON & CO. LTD.
BOUND BY A. W. BAIN & CO. LTD.

CONTENTS

PREFACE 9

I FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 1 3

II DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 3 1

III MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 53

IV IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY 71

V PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 92

VI ISLAM I 15

VII EGYPT 1 34

VIII ARABl’s TRIAL 1 56

IX CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 177

X HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING 203

XI IRELAND 220

xii balfour’s prisoner 244

XIII REHABILITATION 257

XIV EGYPT AGAIN AND LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 288

XV THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES AND COLLECTED POEMS 32 I

XVI THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 342

NOTES 373

BIBLIOGRAPHY 397

INDEX 4 O 3

ILLUSTRATIONS

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT {Elliott & Fry) frontispiece

Wilfrid blunt {circa i860) facing p. 34

'skittles’ 44

LADY ANNE BLUNT 54

MAP 71

LOVE SONNETS OF PROTEUS, XXXI (Facsimile of Wilfrid Blunt’s

Handwriting) 126

CRAB BET PARK 204

WILFRID BLUNT IN PRISON DRESS 248

LADY ANNE BLUNT 260

SHEYKH OBEYD — THE HOUSE AROUND THE LEBBAK TREE 2*]2

WILFRID BLUNT IN EGYPT 294

NEWBUILDINGS PLACE 334

WILFRID BLUNT’S GRAVE 37O

7

PREFACE

It is a pleasure to record my debt to the many friends and
acquaintances of Wilfrid Blunt who have given me information
and personal impressions and in some cases have permitted me
to use unpublished manuscript material — in particular Mary,
Countess of Lovelace, Lady Helena Carnegie, Lady Margaret
Sackville, Professor Gilbert and Lady Mary Murray, The
Hon. Neville Lytton, The Hon. Anthony Lytton-Milbanke,
Lady Cockerell, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Adeane, Mr. Philip
Napier, Mr. Wilfrid Meynell, Mr. W. B. Yeats, Mr. Logan
Pearsall Smith, Mr. Shane Leslie, Mr. Desmond MacCarthy,
Mrs. Charles MacCarthy, and Blunt’s devoted nurse Miss
Elizabeth Lawrence. Lady Gregory, R. B. Cunninghame
Graham and Mrs. Philip Napier, whom I had hoped to thank
are now, alas, beyond the reach of my gratitude.

Among Wilfrid Blunt’s friends my greatest debt is to his
literary executors, Miss Dorothy Carleton and Sir Sydney
Cockerell, not only for permission to make use of Blunt’s
published writings but for their generosity in placing at my
disposal unpublished material and for the confidence they have
placed in me.

My debt for material drawn from other sources is indicated
by asterisks starring certain books in the appended biography.
To their authors or editors and their publishers I am obliged
for permission to quote from the books in question.

To Sir Sydney Cockerell I am grateful for reading both the
manuscript and the proofs of the book; and to Lt.-Colonel
Percival G. Elgood, author of the article on Wilfrid Blunt in
The Dictionary of National Biography , who first encouraged me
to write a life of Blunt, for reading the manuscript. I wish to
thank also Professor Samuel C. Chew for his kind interest and
suggestions, and Mr. Desmond MacCarthy for his invaluable
counsel.

Above all I am indebted to Professor Lucy Martin Don-
nelly for criticism and advice at every stage of my work.

Edith Finch

9

to

D.G.F. and E.B.F.

CHAPTER I

FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND
YOUTH

i

The man whose story is told in the following pages seemed in
his lifetime to be a champion of lost causes and was certainly
regarded as an unmitigated nuisance by those who were
directing the policy of England. In the light of subsequent
developments it is apparent that he understood more pro-
foundly than the powerful of his day the problems of Empire
and the British tradition of handling races. From one point
of view he is merely romantic, and possibly frivolous and
self-absorbed; from the other, he is an interpreter of the
deepest and wisest instincts of the Anglo-Saxon race. For this
reason, and especially at this moment, his career is well worth
following. That he was a true poet and master of the art of
living and also imbued with the habits and standards of his
class makes all these aspects of him more interesting, if a little
more complicated.

Gifted in too many ways to be supreme in any one, Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt, by the same token lived with extraordinary
gusto a life, as he remarked, of ‘real romance’. His name
suggests to some people Egyptian Nationalism or Irish prisons
or travels in Arabia ; to others, sonnet sequences ; and to a more
intimate group a singularly handsome man of the world,
vain, proud, part squire, part squire of dames, part breeder of
Arabian horses, a dangerous politician, and yet somehow
emphatically one of themselves. He had the love of beauty
and adventure and the many accomplishments of the Renais-
sance gentleman and is often called an Elizabethan. None the

*3

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

14

less he was thoroughly Victorian, permeated by the self-con-
sciousness and moral questioning of his own day. His inde-
pendence places him among the aristocratic rebels who were
the inheritors of Byron and Shelley in the second half of the
nineteenth century.

His fame is now beginning to emerge from the obscurity
into which, as often happens, it fell after his death. Certain of
his best poems are found in the anthologies and his published
diaries are increasingly read. Recent memoirs and books about
Imperial politics mention him. The younger generation of
English intellectuals is aware of him as a poet and knight
errant — a little old-fashioned, perhaps, in the grand manner
but on the right track, a ‘scourge of the oppressor’.

From his travels among peoples whom he regarded as
oppressed he realized whither Victorian Imperialism was
leading — often has led. He urged measures on behalf of
India, Egypt, Ireland, which have in many cases been adopted,
and prophesied with startling foresight certain post-war
disasters. Time has proved him to be no sentimental visionary.

His anti-imperialism arose not from any lack of pride in
England and her destiny but from genuine patriotism. The
gradual development of his ideas makes this clear as does
the almost fanatical devotion with which he clung to his own
countryside. The Sussex Weald became to him the last
entrenchment of the traditions and virtues which he cherished
as most truly English. Newbuildings Place where he lived
out his last years and where he is buried in the Sussex fields

which gave me birth
And saw my youth, and which must hold me dead

is haunted by his ghostly presence. Nothing has been changed
there since his death in 1922. With the passage of time the
yew hedges have grown tall and unkempt. Weeds and vine
tendrils hide the garden steps. The Arab mare still grazing in
the paddock and the spaniel snoozing under the trees of the
Jubilee garden are old and fat. Inside the house the furniture

FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 15

has become shabby and the colours are faded. But around any
turning at any moment it seems as if Wilfrid Blunt might
appear — a tall distinguished figure, bearded and brilliant-
eyed, majestic in Arabian robes.

For three hundred years or more the Blunts can be traced
back in Sussex history. Only two streams of non-Sussex
blood, of West Country blood, ran in their veins: that of the
Glanvilles of Catchfrench and the Scawens of Molennic,
‘The latter “a mere old British stem” as the historians of
Cornwall quote’. Of this stem Wilfrid Blunt was left the
senior representative with the right of quartering its arms.
But it was in his Sussex forebears that he was most interested
and their estates that he cherished. He edited and had
•privately printed various documents relating to the Crabbet
estate, his father’s richest inheritance; he wrote a history of
Newbuildings, the part of his family possessions that he him-
self enlarged; and he also edited those plodding pages from
the Diary of Mr. John Baker from which fall a few dry crumbs
of welcome detail about the Blunts.

Mr. John Baker, a wealthy city business man, in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century moved to Horsham Park in
Sussex. He quickly became friendly with the neighbouring
gentry and his account of them, ‘their daily lives and doings,
their feastings and amusements, their church-goings, their
card-playings and their judgments on the bench’ through its
very pedestrianism gives reality to the worthy people who
figure there. More to the point, it brings a flicker of life to
Samuel Blunt and his second wife , 1 Winifred Scawen, and
their three small sons Robert, William, who was Wilfrid
Blunt’s great grandfather, and Harry.

It was in the days of this Samuel, justice of the peace and
chairman of the Horsham Bench of Magistrates, that the Blunt

1 6

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

estates attained to their full extent. The Blunts of Horsham
had been settled for four generations on lands known in
Wilfrid Blunt’s time as Springfield House, bought in 1660
by Samuel Blunt’s great-grandfather. Samuel possessed a
landed estate scattered over no less than eighteen parishes of
Sussex and two of Surrey. By his marriage in 1762 with
Sarah Gale, his first marriage, he came into possession of the
estates of Crabbet and Newbuildings and the manor and
forest lands of Worth. Four generations later, Wilfrid Blunt
leased Springfield House to his cousin, Gerald Blunt, great-
grandson of Samuel’s youngest son, Harry, and himself
inhabited Crabbet Park for a quarter of a century before
moving to Newbuildings.

The Blunt side of the family was evidently solid and typical
of its social status. In the Scawens, however, there was some-
thing more adventurous that showed itself later in Blunt’s
father, Francis Scawen Blunt, and even more definitely in
Blunt himself. Winifred Scawen, Samuel Blunt’s second wife,
boasted an uncle, William Scawen, who ‘died a much despised
man’ and a brother, Captain John Scawen, who fought with
‘Fighting Fitzgerald’, ruined himself in racing, and went out
to India where he died in 1800.

Francis Blunt, at sixteen, directly after leaving Harrow,
joined the First Grenadier Guards as a junior ensign and
fought under Sir John Moore in the Peninsular War. He was
wounded while carrying the colours in the Battle of Corunna
and was brought home to Plymouth aboard the Victory , along
with the brace of pointers and the fowling piece which he had
taken out with him for sport by the way and the heavy
mahogany desk and still heavier box of papers which had
accompanied him through the campaign. The wound had
been neglected and, though his life was saved through the
kind offices of his uncle Glanville of Catchfrench and the
devoted nursing of his cousins, he was permanently lamed
and obliged to leave the army. After the peace of Paris he
made the Grand Tour of Europe, returning, according to his

FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 17

son Wilfrid, free from those ‘grosser English prejudices’ so
prevalent among his contemporaries and possessed of accom-
plishments unusual with Englishmen of his generation: he
spoke Italian, French and Spanish; he had ‘learned painting’
in Italy; and he sang to his own piano accompaniment. He
began to take considerable pride in having been a younger
contemporary of Byron at Harrow and even greater pride in
having been born in 1790 in the same parish of Horsham in
which Shelley was born two years later. These extraordinary
satisfactions, however, did not prevent his upholding with
relish his worldly position. He became a keen shot with rifle
and fowling-piece and bow, a lover of cockfights and racing
and boxing, a member of Crockford’s Club, a frequenter at
one time of the Prince Regent’s set at Brighton — though
‘never one of its more vicious members’ — later a forward rider
at Melton in its best day, and at the time of his death Master
of the Crawley and Horsham foxhounds. He was an able
out-of-door speaker, and a justice of the peace and deputy-
lieutenant of the county. Needless to say, he was a Tory in
politics, and owing to his military training, a staunch supporter
of the Duke of Wellington. Owner of ‘some four thousand
acres of land, mostly poor but veiy beautiful, in the most
beautiful of southern counties’ he was, after the tradition of
his family, first of all a squire. His greatest pride lay in being
an efficient proprietor and a respected landlord. Years after
his death his son Wilfrid wrote of him: ‘In him I see reflected
the better, more adventurous, happier side of my man’s
nature.’

Fortunately — or was it unfortunately? — Francis Blunt
married in 1838 Mary Chandler with whom a less robust,
though possibly more intellectual strain entered the family.
High-spirited, sensitive, fascinating, she had inherited a
‘certain Shandian wit’ possessed by her father, the rector and
squire of Witley near Godaiming, and her uncle, the Dean
of Chichester. Cardinal Manning told Wilfrid that she was
the wittiest woman he had known — an opinion largely borne

B

18 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1840-1844

out, her son thought, by her letters. Wilfrid Blunt’s own
recollection of her was as a tall pale widow, dark-eyed, delicate
of frame, passionately fond of her children — especially of
Wilfrid himself — ‘brilliant in talk but sad in the memory of
joys departed’, ‘forever seeking vainly in thought for a heaven
no longer to be found upon the earth she loved’. Her three
children, Francis Scawen, Wilfrid Scawen and Alice Mary,
inherited not only her tubercular malady, but, more happily,
her charm and her poetical, restless nature.

3

Wilfrid was born on August 17th, 1840, not at Crabbet
Park, his father’s house, but at Petworth where his mother
had gone to stay with her husband’s sister, Mary, wife of
George Wyndham, later first Baron Leconfield. 2 The con-
nection with the Wyndham family was to be close throughout
Wilfrid’s life. Within a little more than two years Wilfrid’s
father died, the children were left wards in Chancery and the
Blunt property was entailed upon the eldest son Francis, a child
of three, fifteen months older than Wilfrid. A year later, when
Wilfrid was three years old, Crabbet had to be let, and the
family moved to Petworth Rectory House. This year at
Petworth where he played with his somewhat older Wyndham
cousins provided Wilfrid with his earliest memories : the deer
in the park; the fawn which fed out of his cousin Caroline’s
hand; the emus; the tortoises in the courtyard by the tennis
court; the red admiral and peacock butterflies in the kitchen
garden ; ‘the herd of swine which sometimes trooped in at the
open window and rioted through the long reception suite on
the ground floor’ ; the gigantic dolls’ house at the foot of the
stairs; and all the other glories of the great house, ‘a vision
of mundane stateliness and size’.

The continuity and homeliness of life at Petworth was
brought into relief in Wilfrid’s mind later by the changing

1844-1846 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 19

scene of his own next years. Owing chiefly to his mother’s
restlessness the Blunts moved from pillar to post, paying
family visits, settling for a year or so here or there in England
or on the continent. When he reflected on his childhood long
afterwards this lack of a fixed abode seemed to Wilfrid to be
‘a considerable misfortune, for a life to be perfect should have
for its beginning the strong and definite visual impression of
a permanent home. ... It almost seems,’ he wrote, ‘as if the
ideal life ought to begin and end under the same roof tree.’

The family’s first journey on the continent was in 1846
when they drove in the huge ancient travelling chariot used by
their father through Normandy and the southern provinces
of France to the Pyrenees. Perched aloft on the box beside
Robert Moorey, the grumbling old family retainer who was
highly military and detested the French, the small boys
enjoyed themselves more and more keenly.

When we neared the mountains crowned with snows,
And heard the torrents roar, our wonder grew
Over our wit, and a new pleasure rose
Wild in our hearts, and stopped our tongues with dread,
The sense of death and beauty overhead.

They spent the summer in the foothills at Bagneres de
Bigorre where their garden, garnished with orange trees in
tubs, ran down to the river Adour. Riding turn and turn
about on a rough hill pony they made short excursions into
the mountains with their mother — ‘I remember that she
gathered us a gentian which first revealed to me the meaning
of beauty as a reality of pleasure.’ She taught them the
favourite Victorian pastime of pressing flowers and fastening
them in a book. ‘I have it still,’ Wilfrid wrote in 1886,

a book with pages sewn

Cross-wise in silk, and brimming with those flowers,
Treasures we gathered there, long sere and brown,

The ghosts of childhood’s first undoubting hours.

20

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1846-1851

At ‘La Colombiere’, an avenue of tall beeches some miles
away in the hills, they watched, half terrified, pigeons being
netted on their spring passage northwards from Spain. ‘I think
there is something instinctively attractive in a net as though
it concealed a danger,’ Blunt commented when he was an old
man. ‘Such is a spider’s web, and such perhaps was later the
fascination tennis had for me with the mystery of its netted
galleries.’ With an even greater dread, instilled in them by
their Calvinistic Scotch nurse, they were impressed by the
Roman Catholic ceremonies at Bigorre: the profession of a
nun in the convent church, and ‘the lighting the bonfire of
St. John on Midsummer Eve, which took place on the Cous-
tousse in the presence of the local clergy headed by a mitred
bishop with full Roman pomp’.

After wintering at Pau they returned to England, stayed
for some weeks with their great-uncle old Dean Chandler in
the Deanery at Chichester, and the two boys paid a few days’
visit to the tenant living at Crabbet, a visit of enchantment
to them, for Crabbet was their rightful home, the play-
ground of their fancies, where they dreamed of one day
living. But it was only a drop of happiness in a bitter cup —
in August 1 847 they were sent off to their ‘slave days’ at a
private school at Twyford on the Itchen four miles from
Winchester.

Wilfrid, shy and sensitive and not very strong, had been
spoiled at home. He hated being plunged into the midst of
sixty boys all older than he. And Francis was unable to protect
him from their bullying. ‘Morally the school was a sink’, the
sanitary conditions were of the worst, the food was insufficient,
and the winter cold biting. As neither of the boys com-
plained Mrs. Blunt did not realize the situation until the third
summer, when Wilfrid fell seriously ill and she was sent for.
Then she snatched her sons away for another winter of slow
travel in the family coach on the continent. The experience
of Twyford was one from which Wilfrid was long in recover-
ing. It had been

1847-1851 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 21

Childhood embittered, its brute joys the same,

Only in place of kindness cruelty,

For courage fear, and for vain-glory shame.

But it had made him, he felt, more sensitive to happiness,
more conscious of degrading ugliness, than most men.

Back in England again the following autumn the boys were
expecting to go to Harrow when their mother suddenly
informed them that they were to travel in Italy with a tutor.
On their arrival at Boulogne a second blow, ‘a very hard
blow’, fell upon them. Their mother explained that she had
been received into the Roman Church at Easter. Aware that
she had given the children little instruction in religious doctrine
because of her own uncertainties and that their Scotch nurse
had taught them to look upon the social and intellectual gap
between Papists and Protestants as abysmal, she had lacked
courage to tell them of her conversion until they were again on
foreign soil. While at Petworth she had come under the
influence of Henry Edward Manning, rector of Lavington
and a constant visitor at her house, as he continued to be until
her death. Manning at that time was a high church Anglican
and under his guidance Mrs. Blunt threw herself ‘with all the
zeal of her speculative nature’ into the Tractarian Movement.
In the summer of 1844 when the Blunts were living at
Alverstoke, she saw a great deal of the high church clergy
there: Samuel Wilberforce, rector of the parish, and the
curates, Henry Burrows, Malan the philologist, and Trench,
later Archbishop Trench. She now told her children of
Manning’s growing dissatisfaction with Protestant tenets, his
resignation of the living at Lavington, his entering the Roman
Catholic Church, and of her following him there. The children,
filled with unspeakable shame, burst into tears.

Before the end of the winter, however, with the aid of the
tutor, ‘an Oxford muscular Christian of the Kingsley type’,
himself a recent convert to Rome, the conversion of the
children was duly accomplished. Francis, always the most

22 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1852

docile and naturally pious, capitulated first; Wilfrid took
longest, because of pride and fear of what other boys would
think. At Shrovetide, 1852, at Aix-en-Provence the three
young Blunts were received with pomp into the Roman
Catholic Church, and Wilfrid, aged eleven, soon found happi-
ness in swinging a censer at the Capuchin Convent close by
their house in Genoa. 3 The conversion changed the direction
of the children’s lives. Though Wilfrid never became as
devout a Roman Catholic as his brother and sister, his character
and habit of mind were permanently affected and throughout
his life his sympathy with the church is evident. As he wrote
later,

’Tis no small matter to have lived in Rome,

In the Church’s very bosom and abode,

Cloistered and cradled there, a child of God.

As summer approached the Blunts drove along the Corniche
to Lucca, settling at Bagni di Lucca. In the chestnut groves
near by lived two other families of English children whose
parents were recent converts, the Mannings, children of the
Cardinal’s brother, and the Laprimaudayes, children of the
Cardinal’s curate at Lavington, the Reverend Charles Lapri-
maudaye. It was new to the Blunts to have friends of their
own age and they rejoiced in them.

Annie, the eldest Laprimaudaye daughter, tall, beautiful,
kind, ‘both grave and gay’, ‘with eyes of almond shape and
cheeks of milk and roses’, became Wilfrid’s first love. She was
sixteen and he approaching twelve; a distance between them
so great that he adored her silently, remotely, as a saint. The
last walk of the summer brought the first kiss, a farewell
embrace, the climax of an idyll, Wilfrid’s first seraphic vision
of happiness. Despite its childish beginning, the devotion
was a lasting one, ending only much later, when convent walls
in Rome closed upon Annie, ‘nor even wholly then, if all
things should be told, seeing that it found fruition, not indeed
with her, but with a kindred personality in after years’.

1852-1853 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 23

In December the Blunts crossed Mt. Cenis on sledges to
return to England, where an experience ‘more spiritually
important’ than any he had yet known awaited Wilfrid. In
the first week of 1853, Mrs. Blunt placed the boys with the
Jesuits at Stonyhurst, 4 settling herself at Mortlake on the
Thames. The choice of this school was wise, for, as Blunt
pointed out, only among the Jesuits is the doctrine of the
Church’s infallibility pushed to its logical limits and placed
on a personal basis of obedience to those who expound it. The
system has a strict rule of conduct and of belief that com-
pletely subjugates the soul to the Church. For Wilfrid, hand-
some, charming, self-willed, idle and with no zeal like his
brother’s for piety, it provided the discipline that was essential
to strengthen his character.

The life at Stonyhurst, though no less rigorous than at
Twyford, was a good deal more wholesome. There was con-
stant supervision and no rebellion. Each class was almost a
separate school of twenty boys with its special master who,
according to medieval tradition, took them straight through
syntax, grammar, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy, and those
who were to find a vocation in the Church, through divinity.
Under this system, the masters had ample opportunity to
know their boys thoroughly. Father Thomas Porter, a man of
wit and imagination and kindliness, became virtually the
spiritual father of Wilfrid’s class and very soon gained com-
plete control over Wilfrid himself, caning him when needful
and then encouraging him with a word of praise.

Wilfrid much enjoyed writing papers for Father Porter.
By one on Death which was read out in class he gained a
second prize and the title of Carthaginian Emperor. He wrote
also on butterflies for which he had developed a taste in Italy,
a taste shared by his school friend, John Gerard. Many
years later, Gerard, by that time a worthy matter-of-fact
Jesuit and well-known opponent of Darwin, reminded Blunt
that they used to keep caterpillars in boxes and that Wilfrid
‘had insisted upon pricking holes in the lids in the form of

24 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1853

constellations so that the caterpillars inside might think
they were still out of doors and could see the stars’ —
a highly characteristic attempt on Blunt’s part to restore
to the imprisoned a glimpse at least of their natural environ-
ment.

For Father Porter’s sake Wilfrid made a spiritual retreat,
was prepared for communion and taught that this life is but a
preparation for the future life. With the alternative of Heaven
or Hell set before him, he was logical enough to see that the
future was the only life worth living for. ‘At that time,’ he
wrote in 1876, ‘I vividly felt God’s presence as a reality in my
daily occupations. I did my best to please Him ; but I do not
remember that any special token of His presence was given
me.’ '

If he had returned, as he intended to do, after the first
half-year’s vacation and the influence of Father Porter had
persisted, he thought later, he might have become a Jesuit.
It seemed to him that he was of the stuff of which Jesuits are
made — little, he admitted, as his history appeared to prove
it — and he longed for the simplification of life enforced by so
strict an order. ‘The Jesuit novitiate,’ as he wrote in 19 11,
‘is the most mentally crushing process ever invented,’ but it
would at least have freed him from his most troublesome
doubts and responsibilities and would have brought him peace.
Once at home on holiday from Stonyhurst, however, he was
allowed to remain and, gradually falling into old habits,
developed in the next few years in ways that he looked back
upon with no great satisfaction.

4

At this time Sir Henry Taylor, author of Philip Van Arte-
velde, was living at Sheen, near the Blunts’ Mortlake home,
his household the centre of many of the intellectual and
artistic personages of the day. Foremost of this group was

X 8 5 3 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 25

the eccentric and imperious Mrs. Cameron. 5 One day when
calling upon his mother, Mrs. Cameron saw several of
Wilfrid’s drawings and promptly espied in them traces of
embryo genius. Wilfrid had always had a taste for drawing,
inherited probably from his mother, who herself had done
‘many admirable pencil drawings’ of the seventeenth century
cottages of Witley. At Stonyhurst he had been encouraged to
follow this bent. Now, urged by the redoubtable Mrs.
Cameron, he put whatever time he could spare from
natural history in Richmond Park and on Barnes Common
and from rowing on the Thames into painting under the
instruction of a local German artist of no skill but some
teaching ability.

Having no money to pay a model and feeling himself too
inexpert to ask any of his friends to sit to him, he painted his
own portrait as he believed he had looked a few years before.
It hangs now at Newbuildings, and is an extraordinarily
mature piece of work to be done by a boy of fourteen. Mrs.
Cameron, delighted with the fulfilment of her prognostications,
at once declared that G. F. Watts should take the boy as
pupil. Wilfrid, accordingly, was escorted to Little Holland
House and Watts, despite the fact that he never took pupils,
was persuaded to take this one. During six months before
going to the master Wilfrid was to receive preliminary instruc-
tion at a studio in Newman Street. For three days a week for
some time he made chalk drawings from plaster casts and
occasionally from a living model ; but the day' when he was
to go to Watts never came. His mother’s illness and death
ended the idea of his becoming a painter by profession before
his apprenticeship began. Years later he sometimes regretted
this — less however than his departure from the Jesuits — and
he continued both to paint as an amateur and to be deeply
interested in painting and in all the arts except music, which
he definitely disliked.

Mrs. Blunt died early in June 1853. This early contact
with death confounded Wilfrid; it was the first step on the

26 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1853-1856

way to the realization from which much of his later thought
and poetry sprang, that

Every creature that hath breath

Goeth with the taint of death.

Mrs. Blunt had named as the children’s guardian Dr.
Grant, the excellent Catholic Bishop of Southwark, an appoint-
ment the Lord Chancellor set aside as not legal in favour of
the children’s nearest relations: on their father’s side, Mrs.
Wyndham, later Lady Leconfield, known to them as ‘Aunt
Wyndham’; on their mother’s side, her first cousin, Henry
Currie 6 of the family of bankers — both Protestants. Though
they did not try to influence the children religiously, leaving
the boys at Oscott, the Catholic School where they had been
during the last three months of their mother’s illness, and
sending Alice to a convent school at Roehampton, their
guardianship effectually ended the Roman Catholic character
of the children’s home surroundings. Their holiday time was
spent in an atmosphere not of the church, but of the world.
With Mrs. Wyndham they moved in the best London
circles; with Henry Currie at the beautiful old Jacobean house
of West Horsley Place in Surrey they poached about with
muzzle-loaders alone or with the keeper after rabbits on the
common and sometimes shot a pheasant over the borders on
the East Horsley land, Lord Lovelace’s, ‘little dreaming of the
family connection there was one day to be’ between Wilfrid
and Lord Lovelace. They danced, played battledore, read
poetry and fancied themselves in love with their pleasant
Currie cousins.

The first months at Oscott had been marked only by mental
sloth and complete moral and physical relaxation; even the
play was on a lower level than at Stonyhurst. The school was
‘a place without religious colour of any kind, a sort of “Sleepy
Hollow”, where nobody was quite wide awake enough to be
vicious. It suited my natural indolence,’ Blunt wrote years
afterward, ‘to a most unfortunate degree; and, though I con-

1853-1856 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 27

tinued to be a “good boy” it was without intelligence, and
without fervour.’ Religion at Oscott was unattractive: the
boys were mostly coarse and rowdy; the President, Dr.
Weedall, preached his sermon on holiday afternoons, a system
well calculated to antagonize his pupils. ‘The soul cried out
for more; and at last more was provided’: in 1856, when
Wilfrid at the beginning of his third year was in the highest
class, Dr. Charles Meynell became its newly appointed
professor. 7

Dr. Meynell was a brilliant Yorkshireman, at the time not
quite thirty years old, humane, courageous, ‘a poet by tempera-
ment if not by performance’, and accomplished in up-to-date
metaphysics, though no modernist in the sense of being an
anti-Rome partisan. Wilfrid, who always responded to any
interest shown in himself, quickly came under the influence
of ‘that man of original genius’. By Meynell his instincts
of an inquiring and poetic kind were awakened. Together
they read and discussed the poets, unorthodox though they
might be. Under Dr. Meynell’s guidance Blunt learned to
rank Shelley and Keats above Scott and Byron and even
Wordsworth. Not only was his critical taste sharpened, but,
more important, the ‘ambition of romance’ was aroused which,
he said later, made a poet of him.

Meynell became Blunt’s intellectual father as Father
Porter had been his spiritual father. Father Porter had based
the truths of religion on the heart; Dr. Meynell taught Blunt
‘to think, to reason, to argue. . . . The Jesuits had been afraid
of reason’. And they had been right, Blunt thought long
afterwards. They had forbidden him to read a little book
sent him by his mother in which the motto occured, ‘through
the contemplation of created things, by steps we may ascend
to God’. But Dr. Meynell felt no such qualms. He showed
Blunt ‘God in his works, in the necessities of the human mind,
in the metaphysical contradictions involved by a denial of
Him. At that time,’ Blunt wrote, ‘I believed with the most
implicit faith that not only were the truths of religion reducible

28

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1856-1857

to absolute mathematical certainty, but that true reason could
not do otherwise than fortify and illuminate our belief in
them.’ When, years later, he thought that he recognized in
this reliance on reason the source of his restlessness and spiritual
misery he turned with perfect justice for help to Dr. Meynell,
the old friend whose teaching had drawn him away from his
earlier, happier attitude of acceptance.

It was in the summer of 1876, that, breaking a twenty-
years’ silence, Blunt wrote proposing to lay before Dr. Meynell
his ‘position on certain fundamental questions, involving life
and death’ to his soul, asking his old master ‘to throw the
light of Christian philosophy upon it.’ ‘I would give,’ he
wrote, ‘everything I possess for a reasonable excuse to abandon
reason, or better still, to find a cure for my madness in reason
itself, a hair of the dog that bit me.’ The two questions that
he put were: ‘Is there a reasonable probability (apart from
the teaching of the Church), of the existence of a personal
God, just and merciful, who rules the world?’ and ‘What are
our chances of a future life?’ The discussion arising from these
two fundamental questions and Dr. Meynell’s answers to
them were published in a small, brown, typically Victorian
volume of letters entitled Proteus and Amadeus , A Correspon-
dence , a volume interesting now less for the arguments used
than for the light it throws upon the painful ‘sturm und drang’
period of Blunt’s young manhood and his later attitude towards
religion. 8

The metaphysical bent shown in these letters Blunt himself
felt he had gained at Oscott. Perhaps it would be truer to
say that Dr. Meynell had succeeded in awakening the intel-
lectual honesty of his pupil and in stimulating his latent
abilities. Until then Wilfrid had thought of himself with
supreme humility; from that time he was aware of considerable
mental ability and also of his great good looks. The year
1 8 57, when he left Oscott at the age of seventeen, marked the
beginning of a self-consciousness that was the turning point
of his youth.

1857-1858 FOREWORD, CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH 29

5

With his brother Wilfrid spent the next summers on
walking tours in Skye and the Western Highlands and in
Switzerland. They scaled Monte Rosa ‘in the unpredecented
time of twelve hours there and back to the Riff el berg Hotel’;
they crossed the Col du Geant in the Mont Blanc region,
and climbed from the Jardin to near the summit of the Aiguille
Verte, ‘a really dangerous piece of rock work’. On one climb
in the high Alps Wilfrid was nearly killed by an avalanche of
stones, getting a nasty wound in the head which, oddly
enough, gave both brothers confidence. To his astonishment,
Wilfrid began to feel a courage that was, he wrote, ‘a revelation
of the possibilities of manly action in the world which never
left me afterwards; and I think my physical cowardice thus
easily overcome has been in part the reason of what moral
courage I have had at my command in later years. If the
tremendous powers of nature, I reasoned with myself, can be
thus met and conquered, why should I be afraid of man.’

Not long after his accident he was the only one of a party
of English boys at cricket near Lausanne to stand his ground
against the irate Swiss owner of the meadow they were
trampling down. As the peasant approached brandishing a
spade Wilfrid darted under his upraised arm and planted two
blows in his face, drawing blood. The occasion marked, he
observed, the first day of his ‘self-confidence as a man able
to deal with men’.

Though his formal schooling ended with Oscott, he had
continued his studies during the following winters. While
Francis was en pension at Lausanne learning French and
German and his sister was at the convent school of the Sacre
Coeur at Roehampton, Wilfrid lived in London reading with
a tutor to prepare himself for the Indian Civil Service examina-
tion, which was at that time a novelty. He lodged at the house
of ‘one Walford’, who was soon to do him a very ill turn;
and he coached with a Cambridge wrangler, who took no

3 o WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1857-1858

interest in him scholastically, and with an Oxford classics
scholar who embraced the opportunity to indulge his own
taste for Greek poetry, particularly in the less known and
fragmentary texts. The latter, however, gave Blunt what
education he was to have in the dead languages and a topo-
graphical and heroic interest in Greece that was of use to him
later at Athens.

In the season Mrs. Wyndham launched him in London
society, giving him the entree of half a dozen or so great
houses, but his natural shyness combined with a lack of
pocket money and fairly strong Roman Catholic principles,
kept him from indulging in many follies. He fell in love with
his cousin Mary Currie, who took him into favour and read
Tennyson’s Maud with him, giving him to understand that
she was its heroine. This innocent affair and his attachment
for his cousin Constance Wyndham and the two younger
cousins, Edith and Sibyl Montgomery, kept his thoughts well
occupied.

On a fixed day each week he spent some hours with his
sister. Perhaps because she was not unlike him in tempera-
ment, he was especially fond of her. ‘Beautiful of face, dark-
eyed but pale and rather puny through ill health, she was one
of those in whom the soul seemed always to overbear the body
and so emotional that not a day passed for her . . . till she was
sixteen without some passionate outburst leading her to
tears.’ She was witty and charming and had some talent for
verse; the lovely sonnet beginning

Spring of a sudden came to life one day

among her brother’s Proteus sonnets was written by her.
‘For her sake, and that later of others,’ Wilfrid loved, ‘the
Roehampton convent.’ Yet his sister’s decision later to enter
it as a nun was the occasion of his first break with the Church.

CHAPTER II

DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

i

Two months after Wilfrid’s eighteenth birthday a son-in-law
of Mrs. Wyndhanv failed to pass the examination required for
nomination to the diplomatic service. Mrs. Wyndham
managed to have the place transferred to Wilfrid and, in
preparation for the examination, sent him for a short time to
Orleans to polish his French. He lodged at the EvSchd under
the charge of the well-known bishop of the diocese, Mon-
seigneur Dupanloup, and acquired along with the language
considerable insight into French clerical problems. He made
friends with one Pere Shuvaloff, a Russian priest exiled from
the Czar’s court, who found in him, as Cardinal Manning had
done, a possible Catholic neophyte. But Wilfrid’s thoughts
were far from the church and full of London balls and parties
and of his prospects at the Foreign Office.

In early November, he passed his examination and obtained
a nomination to the diplomatic service. The matter seemed
definitely settled. Suddenly an official letter appeared announc-
ing that his appointment would not go forward, as his refer-
ences were unsatisfactory.

Immediately Mrs. Wyndham ordered her yellow barouche,
drove with Wilfrid to the Foreign Office, and sending in her
card to the minister, Lord Malmesbury, who had given her the
nomination, followed it in person. Her ward was left, shame-
faced and alarmed in an outer room to face as best he could
the cross examination of Malmesbury’s private secretaries,
John Bidwell and Drummond Wolff. From them he made out
that Walford, with whom he had lived during the previous

3i

32

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1858-1859

winter, had charged him with an attempt on his wife’s virtue.
It was true that Wilfrid had taken the wife’s part in the daily
Walford bickerings ; once even there had been a slight scuffle
followed by a complaint laid against him, a summons and
mutual apologies; but, after reporting the affair to his guard-
dians, Wilfrid had thought no more about it. Then Walford,
hearing of his nomination had raked the matter up and set it
forth with much exaggeration in a formal letter to the Secretary
of State.

The two private secretaries, noted wags, spared their prey
nothing. By the time he was summoned to follow Mrs.
Wyndham to the minister his nerve was shattered. Completely
tongue-tied, he burst into tears. Lord Malmesbury, to whom
the offence, even had it been true, would perhaps not have
seemed heinous, acquitted him at once and, being a com-
passionate man, asked him and ‘Aunt Wyndham’ home to
lunch with his wife. Though for years the clerks of the Foreign
Office clung to the story with glee, Wilfrid was gazetted on the
last day of 18 58, as unpaid attache.

English diplomacy at this time was essentially pacific and,
in words characteristic of the later Blunt, ‘devoid of those
subtleties which have since earned it the reputation of astute-
ness at the cost of its honesty’. Young diplomats were expected
only to be socially agreeable and to amuse themselves as
decorously as possible. His diplomatic experience, though it
developed in him for the time a distaste for politics, taught him
not to be deceived by the ‘common insincerities which are the
stock in trade of diplomacy’ nor to mistake for public policy
action which was only personal. He gained some professional
knowledge of the machinery of foreign politics and made the
acquaintance of many important figures of the day. When he
resigned at the end of a decade, he was glad to preserve the
diplomatic connection ‘on a friendly footing as of one honour-
ably retired from the Service’.

His first post was at H.M. Legation at Athens. 1 With an
allowance of £200 from his guardians he was launched into a

1859-1860 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 33

new life and for the first time savoured something of the East.
Bandit chiefs were still to be met in the best Athenian society.
‘King Otto wore the Albanian fustanelle, and that and the
costume of the Islands, with its immense balloon-like calico
nether garments and red cap, were the common dress of the
young Greek bloods.’ At the legation he found ‘that good
Irishman’, Sir Thomas Wyse, with William Eliot, afterward
Lord St. Germans, for the first Secretary, and Drummond and
Digby as fellow attaches. Soon Lord Dufferin and his mother,
‘most delightful of women’, arrived on their way from Egypt
to join the legation circle. Outside that circle too, Blunt made
many friends. To his intellectual profit he spent long hours of
discussion with Finlay, the ‘distinguished Socratic sage’, who
was living a hermit’s life in the foothills of Pentelicus. Many
days were passed with two honest Swiss families, the Wilds
and Leutweins. And with the Leutweins’ daughter Helen he
fell deeply in love.

The youngest member of the embassy, only eighteen years
old, Blunt, with his delicate almost feminine beauty and high
soft voice, was a great favourite. He had a vivid personality
and a kind of magnetism that made it impossible for anyone
to remain indifferent to him. On an old white horse, named
Apocalypse in memory of Shelley’s lines, he led the merry
party that twice a week followed a paper-chase. Sometimes
they made longer expeditions, exploring the interior and
voyaging in open caiques to white Sunium and the desert
islands near it. In the spring when Francis, then an ensign
in the 60th Regiment, came out on leave to join his brother,
they journeyed on horseback into the Morea, to Mycenae and
Nauplia. No roads existed, only mountain mule tracks; the
going was' dangerous on account of the robbers still common
in the mountains and they felt safer with the pistol and gun
that Wilfrid for the first time owned.

As they galloped through the grey olive groves carpeted
with poppies, Byron’s poetry came constantly to mind, stirring
an enthusiasm so strong that it forced Blunt even years later

34 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1859-1860

■when he was inclined to write somewhat deprecatingly of Byron
as a poet to admit that ‘his “Isles of Greece” at any rate was
an inspired utterance’. He became a Byron worshipper and
began to fancy himself a very Byronic figure, an impression not
lessened by his passion for Helen Leutwein and doubtless add-
ing a secret satisfaction to the lighter romance in which he
indulged for the blue-eyed, barefoot daughter of Edward Noel,
one of the last English Philhellenes. She inspired certain
verses in his shabby black notebook beside the more serious
lines written to his beloved Helen Leutwein.

He was unable, however, to yield wholeheartedly to his
Byron obsession. Instinct and training clashed. His Roman
Catholic upbringing forbade all pleasures of the flesh and had
taught him to regard earthly love as unworthy. The problem
of sex, profoundly disturbing in itself, was complicated by the
fact that Helen Leutwein, who died during his second year at
Athens, was a Protestant and therefore, according to his teach-
ing, in danger of Hell-fire. The dilemma set him thinking. It
was the first step in the struggle for which Dr. Meynell had
prepared him in his school-days.

At the end of the summer of i860 an attack of fever caused
him to be transferred to a post in Germany. On the way he
paid his first visit to Constantinople where he was retained for
some weeks by H.M. Ambassador, Sir Henry Bulwer, to work
in the chancellery at Therapia. There for the first time he
came into an atmosphere that, because it was pro-Turk and
anti-Russian, was not only non-Catholic but definitely non-
Christian. It seemed to Blunt that the only ugly elements in
Constantinople were the modern Christian elements. ‘Here,’
he writes, ‘was new matter for my religious tolerance to handle
and where tolerance begins faith’s absolute dominion ends.’
Of his friends only certain Swiss Protestants professed religious
convictions of any sort. He began to feel awkward in persever-
ing, however lukewarmly, in his religious practices and to
realize his disadvantage in not possessing so wide a knowledge
of the physical universe as his friends. Because his reading was

WILFRID BLUNT (circa i860)

I 860

DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

35

limited by the bann of his church he could not fortify his
religious position with ‘scientific facts’ as they were able to do.

His journey from Constantinople was taken in a dissatisfied
state of mind in which the charm of primitive life was brought
into sharp contrast with the so-called advantages of civilization.
Riding over the broad plain of the Dobrudja, across wide
stretches of grassland unbroken except by a wandering Tartar
tribe and grazing camels and ‘great eagles sitting in pairs on
the mounds’ that marked ‘the sites of ancient battles where the
forgotten slain lay buried’, he and his companion entered the
sombre patriarchal world of the Old Testament. ‘It revealed
to me,’ Blunt wrote long afterwards, ‘the beauty of nature
uncivilized, not yet defaced by the creative ugliness of modern
man.’ They came to the wall of Trajan, once the bulwark of
the Roman Empire against the Scythian barbarians of the
north, and found ‘on its grass-grown bastions’ Scythian
shepherds with their flocks, playing their reed pipes. For some
days they stayed among the shepherds, shooting hares and
partridges, then went on by way of Varna and Kustenji to
Tchernavoda, where they took steamer up the Danube to
Vienna.

In the course of the journey, a Moldavian Hospodor, Prince
Bibesco, and his family boarded the boat. With them was an
Englishman whose not very distinguished appearance and
brusque manner misled Blunt into taking him for the family
tutor. During the several days’ voyage Blunt made fast friends
with ‘the tutor’, talking with him of the East about which his
knowledge proved to be profound. Not until they reached
Vienna where the tutor proposed accompanying him to the
British Embassy, did Blunt discover that his companion was
Henry Stanley, Lord Stanley of Alderley, a strong Philo-Turk,
an authority on many Eastern questions, and a Mohammedan
to boot. The friendship begun on the Danube lasted through-
out Stanley’s lifetime, and for Blunt extended itself to all the
members of Stanley’s family. On arriving in London he saw
much of the two younger Stanley sisters, Kate, afterwards Lady

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1860-1861

36

Amberley, 2 and Rosalind, later Lady Carlisle. Beautiful and
vivid they whirled Blunt away in an orgy of lively talk with all
the piquancy of enthusiastic prejudice. Nothing in heaven or
earth passed unquestioned or undiscussed. They stimulated
in him an intellectual activity that had much to do with the
later individuality of his views and that, more immediately,
proved disconcerting during his life in Germany.

2

Frankfort early in the year 1861 was rife with religious and
philosophical discussion. At the British Embassy Blunt was
surrounded by frankly professed doubters and unbelievers.
He became very intimate with Lady Malet, the wife of the
Ambassador, who, though kindness itself, troubled him — like
almost everyone in Frankfort — by her constant speculation on
religious problems and her discussion of Darwin’s Origin of
Species and of Essays and Reviews by Jowett and his followers.
Not only did Blunt feel his inability to read these books a
drawback in conversation, but he was oppressed by the belief
that only with the aid of first-hand information could he answer
the questions arising in his own mind. He burned with desire
to know ‘the truth’ :

to hold the actual thing and be
Bound by no law but hers and liberty.

Such was my soul’s ambition, the fruit fair
And good for food of the forbidden tree.

He wrote asking if his confessor in England could obtain
permission for him to read these books. Receiving a negative
answer he read them anyway despite the Roman Index — his
‘first deliberate sin’, he called it.

Meanwhile he went to England to celebrate Christmas and
the coming-of-age of his brother who was now in possession
of the family estates. Francis was living at Worth Forest

1861-1862

DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

37

Cottage, planning to move to Crabbet Park when he had ful-
filled the promise made to his mother to endow the estate with
a Catholic mission — the Franciscan House and Chapel which
he was busy establishing at the neighbouring town of Crawley
with the privilege for himself of private mass to be said on
Sundays and feast days at Crabbet as soon as he should reside
there. Immersed in practical details and already imbued with
the religious and monastic point of view, Francis felt little
sympathy with his brother’s perplexity. In fact, it made him
thoroughly impatient. Nor did Wilfrid derive much comfort
from his sister. 3

After finishing her schooling at the Convent at midsummer,
Alice had been installed in a dull life with an unsympathetic
lady at Crawley. At Christmas she was restless and showed
none of her old demonstrative affection for her brother. Dis-
appointed and vexed, he was at a complete loss to explain the
change until, not long after his return to Frankfort, she wrote
announcing her intention of entering the religious life. A
letter from Francis at the same time upheld her decision.
Wilfrid was astounded. Alice seemed to him to have settled
her life in far too summary a fashion. Moreover, she was the
person for whim he cared most in the world and the prospect
of losing her acted on him like a challenge. Taking counsel
with his fellow attache Schomberg Kerr, one of whose sisters
had entered a convent, and with Lady Malet, he set off imme-
diately for England ‘to forbid the banns’.

He went directly to Mrs. Wyndham, now ‘Aunt Leconfield’,
protested to her, then to others, and succeeded, backed by their
authority, in persuading Alice to go to her Chandler relatives
at Witley and to put off her initiation for two years till she
should come of age. By the end of the first year’s delay her
intention seemed to have vanished from her mind. Her
relations with Wilfrid resumed all their old warmth, and her
friends — Lady Kenmare, Madeline Wyndham, Georgie
Sumner, Minnie Pollen and others — became his friends too.
Though Alice never reproached him for thwarting her plans,

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1861-1862

38

later he wondered sometimes if he had not been mistaken, if
her life might not have been happier and longer had he not
interfered. At the time of her decision, however, no question
disturbed his certainty.

The episode crystallized his previous religious perplexity
into thorough-going doubt. For the first time he neglected
many of the duties of religion. The ‘days of his utter night’
had begun. He saw ‘the alternative of God or nothingness’,
and was appalled. ‘I still believed enough,’ he wrote in after
years, ‘to be greatly frightened at my state of mortal sin, and
I was continually expecting to die and suffer eternal punish-
ment in consequence. I dared not, during the whole of one
winter, ride across country, for fear of breaking my neck, or
did so with fear and trembling.’ All serenity hung upon the
reconciliation of religion and science.

His endeavours to reason out a possible basis for such recon-
ciliation carried him into materialism. Count Usedom of the
Prussian Legation had given him an article to read to which
he wrote an answer headed, ‘Nec Deus intersit nisi vindice
nodus’. It embodied his interpretation of materialism as
‘mind an accident of matter’, the germ of the Monist philo-
sophy that several years later was to be elaborated by Haeckel.
He wrote also the first version of ‘Body and Soul’ now to be
found in its revised form among his published poems. And he
wrote the prayer that appeared fourteen years later in his first
published volume of verse:

Lighten our darkness, Lord,

And with thy flaming sword
Sever the webs that hide from us the light.

Have we not sought in tears
Some ransom for our fears
Some thread of truth to guide us in this labyrinth
of night?

Blunt’s confidant during this period of unhappiness was
Lord Schomberg Kerr. His mother, Lady Lothian, had joined

1861-1862 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 39

the Roman Catholic Church after her husband’s death, so that
he could understand to a certain degree the problems which
were besetting Blunt. They were constant companions. When
they met, Kerr was twenty-seven years old, but, like Blunt who
was twenty, he was without sexual experience. Blunt himself
had no money for marriage and was ‘too romantically exclusive
to run after mercenary loves. Had it not been,’ he wrote later,
‘for the restlessness thus caused, and which was largely
dependent on my physical temperament, I might at this time
have laid the foundations of a solid professional career. Frank-
fort was a post just then of importance as the seat of the
Germanic Confederation already beginning to be the diplo-
matic battlefield on which the future of Germany was being
fought.’ He might, he thought, have been of use to the
legation in the Schleswig-Holstein affair.

As it was, he and Kerr lived a fairly secluded life in a small
house which they rented outside the town. They plunged into
an intellectual debuach of reading and of verse-making about
‘the higher cravings of their souls’ that left them sad and giddy.
‘Oh, the days of our absurd first manhood,’ Blunt exclaimed
later,

rich in force,

Rich in desire of happiness and praise
Yet impotent in its heroic course,

And all for lack of that one worthless thing,
Knowledge of life and love and suffering!

The pages of the black note-book were covered with meta-
physical verse, some mere doggerel and some, such as the verses
at first called ‘Ravings’ and later ‘Faith’s Apostasy’, to be
worked up years afterwards and included among his published
poems. They went only occasionally into Frankfort society for
the pleasure of ‘valsing’ but, to the infinite astonishment of
their more sedate acquaintances, amused themselves trundling
hoops about the streets, wandering in the forest, fraternizing
in the bierhalle and visiting the tiergarten. Of this period in

40 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1862-1863

his life he afterwards wrote: ‘I felt a call for action of some
decided sort which should make up to me for my vanished
dreams. . . . Like a boy who has slipped off his clothes to
bathe, yet doubtful where and when to make his plunge, I stood
shivering on the edge of sexual sin, attracted by it yet in fear
where it might lead, and half inclined to wrap myself once
more in my beliefs if only I could find excuse in reason to
persuade my soul to return.’

Late in the summer of 1 8 62 Blunt was transferred to Madrid
and stopped in England on the way to make a retreat at the
Redemptorist Convent at Clapham, in a last effort towards
faith. Dismissing discussion and the claims of reason, and
making a general confession, he prayed that grace might
descend upon him. It was of no use: he was unable to say ‘I
believe’. On leaving the retreat he put all scruples behind him
and set himself to enjoy life as thoroughly as he could.

The court ceremonies in which he had to take part in
Madrid bored him intolerably. Under the date April ijth,
1904, in one of the matchless vignettes of My Dianes, Blunt
recalls Queen Isabel of Spain, ‘a great fat colourless blue-eyed
good-humoured woman, with arms like rounds of raw beef.
Beside her, her husband Don Francisco de Assiz, a little stiff
man in a much embroidered coat, and the two royal children,
the Infanta, a thin anaemic girl of thirteen, and her brother,
the little Prince of Asturias a child of six (he was afterwards
king), all four personages sitting on great gilt chairs in a row,
having their hands kissed by a long procession of Spanish
Grandees and officers, the child fast asleep. We of the
Diplomatic Corps had to stand just opposite the throne and
watch the besa-manos for an hour or more together, thus it is
all photographed upon my memory.’

All the same he liked Madrid. Being a Catholic he got on
very well with the Spaniards — they called him a ‘Christiano’
as they did not the other English. He threw himself into a
round of Spanish gallantries and used to go to ‘a sort of enter-
tainment’ where the only refreshments were sugar and water

1862-1863 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 41

and each lady brought her ‘official lover’. But most exhilarating
were the fiestas of the bull ring.

For an Englishman to take a deep interest in bull-fighting
is unusual, and for him to take part in it, almost unheard of.
But Sir William Gregory, inquiring the name of the matador
that he saw at Madrid in 1862, who played his bull with such
expert grace

in his gold embroidered jacket and his red cloak and his
pride,

received the answer, ‘Wilfrid Blunt’. Later he told Blunt of
this episode saying, ‘I wonder you were not afraid’, and
received the answer: ‘I was very much afraid indeed, but I
would not give in.’ To Blunt perhaps, as to the hero of his
proud poem ‘Sancho Sanchez’, there was more to the matter of
bull-fighting than physical beauty and skill and courage or the
social good or ill commonly attributed to it:

‘Meaning was there from the outset, glorious meaning in
our calling

In the voice of emulation and our boyhood’s pride of soul,

From the day when first, the capa from our father’s
shoulders falling,

We were seized with inspiration and rushed out upon the
bull.

‘Meaning was there in our courage and the calm of our
demeanour,

For there stood a foe before us which had need of all our
skill.

And our lives were as the programme, and the world was
our arena,

And the wicked beast was death, and the horns of death
were hell.

‘And the boast of our profession was a bulwark against
danger

4-2 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1863

With its fearless expectation of what good or ill may
come,

For the very prince of darkness shall burst forth on us no
stranger

When the doors of death fly open to the rolling of the
drum.’

3

After a year at Madrid, Blunt was transferred to Paris — ‘this
Paris I was doomed to love’ — a far different city from the one
to which their mother had brought the little Blunts in their
family coach years before. Then he had ‘witnessed the Prince
President’s historic ride through the streets to the Place de la
Concorde with Morny and the rest of his fellow conspirators
in the coup d'etat ' ; now as Napoleon III, the Prince was at
the climax of his prestige, his court had become the most
worldly in Europe, his city the most brilliant.

When Blunt arrived, Paris was en fete for the feast of the
Assumption and its illuminations as he drove up the Champs
Elysees might have been a signal for the life of pleasure he was
to lead there. The excitements of Madrid had been a mere stir
on the surface compared to the gaiety and licence, the turmoil
of alternate ecstasy and suffering upon which he now entered.
In it the passion of his youth culminated, leaving its mark upon
all his after life —

The past, the future, all of weal or woe
In my old life was goi\e, for ever gone.

In September of this year he first met Catherine Walters, or
‘Skittles’ as she was familiarly known, one of the most renowned
courtesans of the late nineteenth century . 4

At twenty-three Blunt had seen a good deal of the world,
and had passed his apprenticeship in affairs of the heart, but
he was still, according to his own description, ‘a fair-faced

1863-1 86$ DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 43

frightened boy with eyes of truth’, still capable of blushing like
his ‘red, innocent hands’. Skittles, though born only a year
before him, was old in experience,

A woman most complete
In all her ways of loving,

and prodigal of love as one

Who careless of deceit
And rich in all things is of all things free.

Though not precisely beautiful, her small head with its bright
chestnut hair, her delicate clear-cut features, large eloquent
grey-blue eyes, her slender figure and sensitive hands, made
her very charming. She had extraordinary zest for life but was
proud and wayward,

Brave as a falcon and as merciless. . . .

Untamed, unmated, high above the press.

‘As if with change of wind’ her mood changed from grave to
gay, from amusement to tears. Blunt, in love with love and
eager to solve the riddle of life, would have been less than
mortal had he not succumbed to her infinite variety.

A liaison with an English Marquis had brought Catherine
Walters to Paris, where she gained her nickname by her pro-
ficiency in a skittles alley much visited by the young men of
the British Legation. Nearly always one or other of them
danced attendance on her. Later, in England, many of them
became members of the group of men of fashion and of wit
that surrounded her. The Sunday parties in Chesterfield Street
and afterwards in South Street, Park Lane, were frequented by
the Prince of Wales and others famous in England’s public
life. Even Gladstone, to the delight of Blunt and of Skittles
herself, ‘came alone to take tea with her, having sent her before-
hand twelve pounds of Russian tea’. In public she was to be
seen roller-skating with inimitable grace in the new, fashion-
able rinks of London and Tunbridge Wells, driving the prancing

44 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1863-1865

ponies of her phaeton in Hyde Park, or riding in Rotten
Row a horse that had run second in the Grand National and
that no one else could ride. The tale is famous of her larking
over the eighteen feet wide water-jump at the National Hunt
steeplechase in Northamptonshire.

But she had another side. She was interested in modern
art, knew something about music, and liked serious reading,
even on religious subjects. Her comments were piercing as
well as racy.

She went on talking like a running stream,

Without more reason or more pause or stay
Than to gather breath and then pursue her whim
Just where it led her, tender, sad or gay.

And her letters, albeit illiterate and nearly illegible, were highly
entertaining. She responded with candour and individuality
to any demand of friendship ; and she could be depended upon
to be generous. Even those who ceased to be her lovers,
remained, as Blunt did, her devoted friends.

In after life Blunt is said to have held that Skittles set his
passion so full ablaze that it burnt out once for all. No other
woman after her could do more than stir the embers. However
that may be, she was the heroine of Esther , his finest sonnet
sequence, and the ‘Manon’ of the Love Sonnets of Proteus , as
well as the subject of most of the early love lyrics in the Sonnets
and Songs by Proteus. Many of his late poems also, hark back
to this first grand passion. In a sonnet of 1876 to ‘Juliet’ he
wrote,

Unworthy Egypt yet enslaves my fears.

During the years in Paris there were moments of exalted
happiness: ‘As long as I was in love,’ he wrote in Proteus and
Amadeus, ‘my love sufficed me, and I cannot say . . . that no
human love ever satisfied the desires of the soul. I have, on
more than one occasion, seemed for days together to be walking
some cubits high above the ground.’ At other times his

‘SKITTLES

1863-1865 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 45

mistress was ‘heartless’ and ‘soulless’ — a ‘broken pitcher’; she
appeared to him to be all vanity, ‘to have sold the keys of
heaven at a vulgar rate’, to have none of the virtues he could
have wished had he chosen her and not been the victim of
‘blind desire’. He was obliged to realize the greater success
of rivals in her affections; and he felt it would be better

To till the thankless earth with sweat of brow,
Following dull oxen ’neath a goad of care
To a boor’s grave agape behind the plough
.... than thus live

Thy pensioner and bondsman, day by day
Doing a fool’s service thus for love of thee.

But he could also write

Kind fate held me, heedless of my prayers,

A prisoner to its wise mysterious ways.

And forced me to thy feet — ah, fortunate me !

Such peace, however, as he describes in the lovely poem ‘A
Day in Sussex’, written at Worth in January, 1864, during a
short holiday in England, he seldom achieved.

The constant strife of adoration and defeat, and the strain
of quickened sensitiveness, took their toll. By the end of 1865
Blunt was worn out; he longed to be ‘like David with washed
face who ceased to weep’; and he ‘was banished by the paternal
care of Lord Hammond, then omnipotent at the Foreign
Office’ from Paris, ‘that city of delight’, to what he regarded as
‘a terrible and undeserved exile at Lisbon’.

His later ideal judgment, that

He who has once been happy is for aye
Out of destruction’s reach,

was not borne out by reality. He stood ‘just at that parting
of the ways in youth where a little sympathy, more or less, of
a certain kind means a whole world of difference in its choice
of a road — on this side to salvation, or that to perdition’. In

46 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1865

these circumstances, as chance had it, no post could have been
better suited to him than Lisbon, for there he found Robert
Lytton, afterwards Lord Lytton, known to many as the poet
‘Owen Meredith’. His kindness proved at the moment Blunt’s
salvation.

4

Blunt and Robert Lytton had already met, in 1861, when
Blunt, passing through Vienna en route from Constantinople,
had called at the Embassy and found Lytton there as a young
attache. ‘It was but a passing glimpse,’ Blunt wrote after
Lytton’s death, ‘but I like to recall it and the picture which
remains in my mind of him as he sat writing, with one hand
busy with his work, and his other caressing his black poodle’s
head. There was something typical in the attitude and the
act.’ Blunt arrived, however, at Lisbon, ‘the mournfullest as
well as the most beautiful of grass-grown cities’, with no
anticipation of renewed friendship or happiness of any sort.

In the burning heat of midsummer only the Chancery
servant was at the Legation to welcome him to his new post.
His one colleague, Mr. Lytton, was living in villegiatura at
Cintra. So in a ramshackle hack carriage, Blunt set off to find
him. Worn out and miserable, he fell asleep as they ‘toiled
up the dusty road in the afternoon to where Cintra lies perched
beneath the eagle’s nest of the Pena’. In the cool mist at the
top of the pass sweet with the fresh smell of corkwoods drip-
ping with rain he suddenly awoke relieved. The carriage had
stopped at the door of a little country inn, kept by an ancient
Welsh landlady, once bumboat woman to the fleet. Lytton
ran out to greet him ‘with that prodigality of afFectionate kind-
ness which was so great a charm in him’. And Blunt had
hardly been half an hour with him before he felt that, ‘like the
pilgrim to the Delectable Mountains, the burden of my sins
was falling from my back, and that I had found a guide and
friend to show me the way out of my misfortunes’.

1865 DIPLOMATIC SERVICE 47

Blunt was in his ‘most poetical phase — very unhappy and
very desirous of being happy’ — and not easily guided. ‘I was’,
he explained long afterwards, ‘constantly expecting a letter
from a person to whom I was attached, which did not come,
and I consoled myself with running about the hills with some
young ladies or carousing on the Pena with Don Fernando and
his unmarried spouse.’ 8 In the quieter intervals the friendship
with Lytton flourished and was steadying to him. Lytton,
already an established poet himself, was quick to recognize
Blunt’s genius and to foster it. He recited and read aloud to
Blunt, his favourite poets at that time, usually Browning or
Victor Hugo. They spent mornings writing poetry together
and sometimes afternoons deep in discussion as they wandered
on donkey-back through the corkwoods.

‘I rejoice to think that these delightful days, which were to
me the first I had ever enjoyed with an intellect of the highest
order — a kind of intellectual honeymoon — were but the
prelude of a true and constant friendship, maintained unbroken
between us till he died. Neither absence, nor growing age, nor
diverging political opinions, were ever able to change it from
the romance it was when it first began.’

Nor was the friendship at all one sided. Blunt had the rare
gift of communicating to all who came into contact with him
a sense of life and of heightening for them the significance of
even the least and most ordinary of objects, feelings, ideas.
Lytton appreciated this to the full. ‘I hope you have not lost,’
he wrote, ‘and will never lose, any of your wondrous elasticity
of life. ... I long to bathe my sensations for a moment in the
buoyancy of yours, as a tired traveller longs for a plunge in
some fresh mountain pool.’ But his affection for the younger
man was founded solidly on the knowledge that, as he said
years later, if he were ill or in any sort of difficulty, Blunt was
the one among his many friends to whom he could turn with
absolute assurance that help would be given him at what-
ever inconvenience to Blunt himself. He relied on him
too in matters of taste and judgment feeling that Blunt’s

48 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1865-1866

‘poet’s nature’ gave him an instinctive sense of fitness.
Blunt seemed to him an artist in all things, not only in
literature.

Soon after Blunt’s departure from Lisbon at the end of the
summer of 18 6y Lytton wrote urging him to ‘go on writing,
and also reading and thinking for the sake of writing’. He
anxiously preached the gospel of work. Matured though
Blunt was beyond his years, Lytton knew by experience that
it was ‘a dangerous privilege and a strange responsibility’ for a
young man to be his own master. Blunt reminded him
strongly of himself and he realized the lengths to which his
‘very unsafe state of mind’ might lead because he too at
Blunt’s age had been desperately unhappy. And his fears
were justified. Blunt fell ill with despondency. For him
‘the flower-pot of fate’ seemed emptied out.

Gradually he pulled himself together and went back for a
second term at Frankfort where he was again immersed in an
atmosphere of religio-philosophic speculation. 6 The ‘days of
his utter night’ were recalled to him and again his religious
scruples arose. All his life he was to regret the loss of absolute
faith. As an old man, in the character of Merlyn ‘speaking
aloud ... to the heart of man’, he said:

Cast not loose thy religion, whether believing or no.

Heavy it is with its rule, a burden laid on thy back, a
sombre mask at the show.

Yet shall it cloak thee in days of storm, a shield when
life’s whirlwinds blow.

For three years now he had been ‘without religion’; he had
weathered the storm unshielded and, though neither unscathed
nor without regret, was able to consider fresh doubts and fears
from a more detached point of view than formerly. He had
already started on that saner road along which his own con-
science and no imposed doctrine, led him. Eight years later
he had progressed far enough to write, ‘’Tis conscience
makes us sinners, not our sins’. In 1866 he was well on the

DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

1866-1867

49

way to such an ironical appreciation of his position as he gives
in a sonnet written six years later :

When I complained that I had lost my hope,

Of life eternal with the eternal God. . . .

Then I was told that pride had barred the way,
And raised this foul rebellion in my head.

Yet strange rebellion! I, but yesterday,

Was God’s own son in His own likeness bred,

And thrice strange pride ! Who thus am cast away
And go forth lost and disinherited.

During this second term in Germany, therefore, his religious
perplexities were no longer permitted to occupy his whole
attention.

Frankfort was ‘a place at that time of first diplomatic
importance as capital of the Germanic confederation and seat
of the diet’. Bismarck was at the outset of his career and
recognized at Berlin as the leader of the Junker party. His
policy had been in part adopted, though he himself was
unpopular with old King Friedrich Wilhelm through whose
efforts he had been replaced at Frankfort by his rival, Count
d’Usedom. Both the Count, a leader of the Prussian Liberal
party, and his wife, ‘the good-natured Scotchwoman who
figures in Bismarck’s memoirs under the name of Olympia as
his bite noir , the subject of his unsparing jests’, welcomed Blunt
into their circle. The young British attache became a sort of
child in the house of the Prussian Legation. The Usedoms
were perhaps more outspoken than is common in diplomatic
circles, and their frankness was useful to Blunt, teaching him
something of Berlin policy and the hopes and fears of German
patriotism.

At the British Embassy he was also in high favour. Lady
Malet, who had sufficient perception to see in Bismarck,
despite his unpopularity at Frankfort, the coming man of
genius, provided Blunt with his one personal recollection of
the great man. She invited him to tea with the future Chan-

50 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1866-1867

cellor to whom she had said that the young Englishman had
some faculty of verse. Bismarck ‘talked pleasantly and well
on literature and science in excellent English for a couple of
hours, affecting a certain Anglomania, where he touched on
politics’. He showed himself at his best and left Blunt ‘with
a feeling of the heroic such as a young man gives to one
already beginning to be famous and who has been kind to him’.

Later, scanning his past life, as he was in the habit of
doing, he thought that he might ‘have risen to heights as a
courtier’ during this time at Frankfort had it not been that
‘the special instinct of such semi-domestic service was wanting’
in him, ‘the audacity mixed with reverence royal personages
expect of their servants’. Possibly ‘the special instinct’ was
lacking because the royal personages were unattractive:
‘The royal houses of Germany are a curious caste,’ he wrote,
‘phlegmatic, sensual, animal, almost childish. In their com-
pany I was constantly reminded of the inbred short-horned
cattle we exhibit at our shows, high pedigreed ruminants bred
to fatten, kindly and complete in their digestive organs but of
no other interest, gazing wide-eyed on a world they believe
to be made for them and whose realities they do not under-
stand.’

Partly because of his dislike of this ‘curious caste’ and
partly because of his personal unhappiness during his first
period at Frankfort he left for South America late in 1867
with a firmly rooted aversion to Germans. In his mind were
associated ‘Death, Winter, the Germans and other repulsive
assertions of power’, and in a sonnet on the decay of the
Turkish Empire, typified in the crumbling old fortress of
Roumeli Hissar on the Bosphorus — a decay caused by the
fact that ‘close on barbarous power tread lust and indolence’
— he wrote,

the very German boor,

Who in his day of fortune moves our scorn,

Purged of his slough, in after ages may
Invite the tears of nations yet unborn.

i 8 6 8

DIPLOMATIC SERVICE

5i

5

At Buenos Aires in 1 8 68 Blunt came under a more virile
influence than any that he had yet encountered, that of the
celebrated traveller and writer Richard Burton, afterwards Sir
Richard Burton. ‘Burton,’ he wrote later, ‘was at that time at
the lowest point I fancy of his whole career, and in point of
respectability at his very worst. His consular life at Santos,
without any interesting work to his hand or proper vent for
his energies, had thrown him into a habit of drinking of which
he afterwards cured himself. He reminded me by turns of a
black leopard, caged, but unforgiving, and again with his
close-cut poll and iron frame of that wonderful creation of
Balzac’s, the ex-galerien, Vautrin, hiding his grim identity
under an Abbe’s cassock.’

While the young attache listened Burton would talk late
into the night of everything in Heaven and Earth ‘till he
grew dangerous in his cups, and revolver in hand would
stagger home to bed’. According to his recitals he was guilty
of every vice and had committed every crime. But their
brutality, Blunt soon found, was more pretended than real,
affected four efater le bourgeois. ‘Even the ferocity of his
countenance gave place at times to more agreeable expressions,
and I can just understand the infatuated fancy of his wife that
in spite of his ugliness he was the most beautiful man alive.’

The extravagance of Burton’s talk went a little to Blunt’s
head. Amorous exploits, such as had already chequered his
career, became under Burton’s influence more daring. There
is a story current of his riding many miles over the hills on a
dark evening to visit the wife of a ranchero, of the husband’s
unexpected return, and Blunt’s flight through a back door.
Incited by Burton’s traveller’s tales he made an expedition
of some hardship on his own account across the wide-rolling
pampas and through the Brazilian forests —

Where sky and earth itself are lost in insolent depths of
green,

52 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1868-1869

broken only by the sheen and glint of insect wings or the
blazing flash of butterflies and bright birds. 7 But it was
Burton’s experiences in the East, especially in Arabia, that
captured Blunt’s imagination. He had been interested in
Arabia ever since reading Palgrave’s Journeys , had had a taste
of the East at his first diplomatic posts, and was now enthralled
by Burton’s stories. They must have illuminated much in
Arabia for him when he made his own journeys there ten
years later, though his views on Eastern men and manners
when he came to know them differed radically from Burton’s.

Meanwhile it was probably as well that he should have been
transferred early in the next year to a post in Switzerland,

the land of lakes and snow,

And ancient freedom of ancestral type,

And modern innkeepers who cringe and bow,

And venal echoes, and Pans paid to pipe! . . .
This is the birth place of all sentiment,

The fount of modern tears.

The saner air of that humanly well-ordered country adminis-
tered a cold douche after the strong wine of association with
Burton and provided the anti-climax to his diplomatic career.
Towards the end of 1869 he married Lady Anne Noel and
resigned from the service.

CHAPTER III

MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL

i

Blunt’s marriage 1 might have been ordained by an ironic
providence prone to repeat its less fortunate experiments.
Lady Anne Isabella King-Noel was the daughter of the first
Earl of Lovelace and Ada, child of that ill-sorted pair, Byron
and Anne Isabella Milbanke . 2 She and her younger brother,
Ralph Lord Wentworth, had been brought up chiefly by their
grandmother, Lady Byron . 3 From her they not only inherited
many traits of character but also received most of their early
training and impressions. Subtler, less domineering, and with
no bent towards reforming others, Lady Anne was, in a
measure, a second Lady Byron; and like her grandmother
before her, she married a man of romantic beauty and
temperament.

Her likeness to Lady Byron Blunt did not, perhaps, per-
ceive at the time of his marriage, though her connection, as
Byron’s granddaughter, with the Byron legend undoubtedly
attracted him. Besides, she was a very considerable heiress in
her own right and she had the virtues enumerated in one of
Blunt’s early sonnets as those of the woman he would choose
to love . 4 Her youthful integrity, her pure features, her clear
sweet voice — Byron’s voice — must have delighted him, no less
than the high spirit that made her fearless and gave her, though
a small woman delicately framed, remarkable endurance in
face of hardship. With this went a devotion to duty and a sense
of justice well-nigh inflexible. She was ‘of the salt of the earth’,
Blunt wrote after her death, ‘nobody was ever so entirely and
naturally good as she was.’

For worldly pleasures she had little taste, but many of

53

54 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

Blunt’s other interests she shared and largely financed. She
was generous, as he was, and willing to toil for oppressed
peoples — or peoples that she looked upon as oppressed — and
like him she was extraordinarily fond of animals. They bred
both Blenheim spaniels and, of far greater importance, Arab
horses: the building up of the famous Crabbet Arabian stud
owed as much to her energy as to his; and, if never a show
rider, she was an unflagging horsewoman all her life and in
her last years became completely absorbed in her horses. At
the age of seventy-seven she is said to have thrown over the
convention of a lifetime to ride astride. Nor was her interest
in horses exclusively practical. Like Blunt she seized every
opportunity to glean information about the history of the
horse, compiling a mass of material on that much-debated
subject, perhaps for the book that he always planned to write.
Indeed her access to the foreign and particularly the Arabic
literature of the subject was readier than Blunt’s, since she was
a much more accurate linguist.

With a mind as keen as Blunt’s she had inherited from her
mother, Byron’s Ada, and from Lady Byron, a genuine love
of learning. She had a student’s zeal and patience unknown
to Blunt. On the other hand she lacked the sympathy and
imagination which often enabled him to grasp the drift of
words spoken in an almost unknown tongue and somehow
convey his meaning in reply. She had less, much less of
course, of the temperament of the artist. Even her not
inconsiderable artistic accomplishment sprang from intellectual
effort rather than any spark of genius. She had an extensive
knowledge of music and owned a fine collection of instruments,
among them a superb Stradivarius listed among the best
Stradivarii as ‘the Blunt (1721)’. But in her performance
there was little feeling: her playing gave pleasure to few
besides herself and was torture to her husband, no music lover
at best. Her sketches and water-colours, though often charm-
ing are too meticulously correct to be of great interest. In fact
Lady Anne was something of a pedant.

MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 55

To those with whom she lived she seemed to be always
preoccupied with minutiae, practical as well as intellectual — to
lack a sense of proportion. The petty arrangements of daily
life and travel distracted her. To others with whom she was
on less intimate footing the restraint imposed by her high
breeding, while it hid her uneasiness, made her appear shy
and repressed. Of the deeper life that flowed securely beneath
the surface worry and hurry and reticence, no one was aware.
Even those who knew her best did not understand why Lady
Anne, brought up by Lady Byron in no dogmatic religious
belief determined suddenly in 1880 to become a Roman
Catholic and to be received into the Church by Cardinal
Manning. She had no evident interest in religion ; her husband
was not at the time a sufficiently ardent Roman Catholic to
influence her. Not until thirty-seven years later, in a letter to
Blunt written from Egypt shortly before her death describing
a vision that had appeared to her at a time of great danger in
Persia in 1879, did she offer any explanation of her conversion.

Lady Anne’s adoration of her husband was single-hearted
up to the time of her conversion. She went her own way, to be
sure, but with the egoism of a wife who identifies herself with
her husband, and looks upon his interest as her interest. He
had the egoism of conscious power and the imagination that
led him constantly to dramatize himself. But if he was
thoughtless of her, overtaxing her strength on their journeys,
she admitted no need for indulgence. And alien to her as was
his attitude toward life and love — his belief that

Love is of body and body, the physical passion of joy
.... All else is a fraudulent toy,

and that there is

room enough beneath the sun
For her, and thee and me —

she would probably have preferred always to ignore his
infidelities. For many years the bitterness she felt was

56 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1869

expressed only in her diary. In 1883 she noted: ‘Conversation
about the hearts of poets — who have no hearts by the way as it
all dissolves in vain words — a wound years ago remains a
wound for ever for me poor woman of the earth as long as I
live. But those who talk pass unscathed — I don’t know which
is more despicable. Why should any creature have power to
wound another?’

But Blunt had his side. For a temperamental and imperious
man his role was a difficult one. He must have realized the
extent of Lady Anne’s forbearance —

thou heapest coal

Of fire upon my head the drear night long

With thy forgiveness.

Her unimaginative goodness could not have been easy to live
with; still less, her uncompromising precision and haunting
sense of chevying details. As she grew older, too, she became
eccentric: in the East she had formed the habit of always
covering her head; her maid coming in with her early morning
tea would find her sitting up in bed wearing a little fishing hat
and with a mackintosh gathered about her shoulders; and she
often retired for the night at the surprising hour of six o’clock —
oddities trying to a fastidious man though in themselves
unimportant enough. But, however much Lady Anne may
have irritated him, Blunt never ceased to admire her. To the
very end he continued to respect and to have faith in her. And
she, even after they had separated by their common wish, could
never see him without again falling under his spell.

2

Immediately after his marriage on June 8th, 1869, the
publication of Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s revelations involved Blunt
in the notorious problems of the Byron family. The summer

1869-1870 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 57

and autumn were spent in discussing the discldsures with
Lady Anne and her brother, Ralph, then Lord Wentworth and
later Earl of Lovelace, and what was to be done about them;
in helping his wife to write letters both tactful and truthful
about the situation; and in condensing a statement of Lady
Byron’s own view of the quarrel.

Before settling in Sussex he and Lady Anne lived for a time
in Paris where they were caught up in the whirl of political
events leading to the Franco-Prussian War. Their apartment
in the Rue de Rivoli became a centre of news and gossip
brought to it by Julie, their somewhat sardonic and very
French bonne , as well as by Blunt himself and his friends,
especially his cousin Francis Currie who was at that time his
mentor. The Embassy, with which his pleasant personal
relations with his successors kept him in touch, held to the
belief that this was no war of government against government
but of race against race: if Germany were beaten, France
would recover; if Germany won, France would go the way of
the other Latin nations — an eventuality unthinkable to the
violently anti-Prussian Blunt.

Although he had no faith in the Emperor, to whom he had
been presented at Biarritz and of whom he had learned much
in Paris, he became an upholder of France so staunch that
when most of the English colony fled from the capital he
stayed on declaring Paris to be impregnable and carried on his
usual life there, even the daily game of ‘real’ tennis at the
Pavilion du Jeu de Paume in the Tuilleries gardens. Only
when in August talk of a republic became violent and Paris
was actually declared under siege could he bring himself to
join Lady Anne whom he had sent with her cousin Alice Noel
out of harm’s way to Dieppe. After the battle of Sedan there
was nothing to do but dispatch a huge box of biscuits to Julie
to keep her through the siege, and return to England to take
possession of Newbuildings Place, the small Jacobean house
belonging to the Blunt estates near Southwater, ten miles
from Crabbet, the seat of Francis Blunt.

5 8

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1870-1872

At Newbuildings, in mid-November 1870, a son, named
after his father, Wilfrid Scawen, was born who lived only
four days. The birth not many years afterwards of a daughter,
Judith Anne Dorothea, in whom Blunt took great pride, did
not satisfy his longing for a son to be his companion and to
maintain the family possessions and traditions. He never
ceased to be haunted by the sense that his life without a male
heir was warped and incomplete.

Early in 1871 the Blunts went out to Madeira to join
Blunt’s brother who was ill there with tuberculosis. After
making a tour of the northern part of the island they left
Francis and went to Spain. There, on a riding trip through
the country, they were arrested as Carlists, and were in danger
of being shot. But the Blunts’ journeys were always made
under a lucky star. They escaped and returned by way of
Paris after the Commune to Newbuildings bringing with them
an odd and indigent Irishman, the painter Molony, whom
they had met in Spain. Molony lived with them for many
years and was supported by them for many more. They liked
his wit and they admired his paintings of which there are a
number of examples still to be seen at Newbuildings and at
Crabbet.

Toward the end of the year Blunt returned to Madeira,
this time to nurse his sister as well as his brother. Alice had
accompanied Blunt when he went out to South America in
1868 as an attache. There she became engaged to William
Frank Wheatley of Ashurst Farm, Sussex, and to Blunt’s
regret, was married to him in June 1869, eight days after his
own marriage. Now in 1872 Alice was with her brother Francis
and like him desperately ill.

In the spring Blunt brought them both to England. Alice
lived into the summer; Francis died at Southampton at the
end of April and was buried in Franciscan robes at Crawley
in the church of the monastery that he had founded.® Blunt
: was far too loyal to his brother to see in this stroke of destiny
anything but fruitless waste and grief. He had not only loved

1871-1872 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 59

Francis but had trusted him profoundly. ‘Thy ways were not
my ways,’ he wrote, ‘thy life was peace.’

And mine has been a battle. . . .

Thou wert a brave, just man, whom all men knew
And trusted, and some loved, and thou to me
Wert as a tower of strength, a sanctuary
To which I fled from the world’s maddened crew,
Wounded by me, and there with bloodstained hands
Clung to the altar of thy innocence.

He would gladly have forgone the inheritance that fell to his
lot on Francis’s death, finding comfort, he wrote, only in

thinking that perhaps some happy day
We yet may walk together, and devise
Of the old lands we loved, in Paradise,

And I shall give account, as best I may,

How I thy tenant was awhile for thee.

But destiny seems sometimes peculiarly intelligent in the
treatment of her subjects, for of all the roles he played, only
in that of squire was Blunt to feel himself completely successful.

From sketches made during his brother’s illness and from
his own hands and feet, which like his brother’s were slender
and finely formed, Blunt modelled in clay a recumbent figure
of Francis in friar’s habit and carved it in English alabaster.
The tomb lies now in a side chapel of the ugly little church of
the Crawley fathers . 6 The figure, impressive in its repose
and grace and purity of line, gives the measure of Blunt’s
sincerity as brother and as artist. It was his one work in
sculpture, and a noble tour de force.

The sonnets entitled In Anniversario Mortis which he wrote
four years later in his brother’s memory are a less brilliant
piece of work than the sculptured figure, but the first three
have a tender simplicity and the last one, a restraint that is
touching.

After Francis’s death the Blunts let Newbuildings to the

6 o

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1872-1873

Hungerford Pollens: Mrs. Pollen was one of the Lapri-
maudaye sisters with whom Blunt had kept up the friendship
of his childhood in Italy and of whom he was to see much in
the next years. The Blunts themselves moved to Crabbet.
But Crabbet at this time was small and insignificant and quite
unsuited to their way of life. With the aid of a Georgian
classic model they drew plans to rebuild it, improving and
amending as they progressed but working always on the basis
of tradition. The house is an example of the way in which
they worked together. The artistic conception and main
design were undoubtedly Blunt’s, the painstaking details and
the drawing to scale Lady Anne’s. Following his theory that
a house should appear to have been built not by a professional
architect but by its proprietor, in harmony with his life and
its surroundings, Blunt contracted for floor by floor with the
local builder and watched each brick and stone as it was laid.
Domestic convenience he ignored : the great hall and the rooms
were well-proportioned but, though they had doors opening
on to the lawn, often there were none opening from room to
room, and the only means of mounting to the upper story was
by the little roundabout stairway belonging to the old house.
Outwardly, however, the result was most satisfactory, beautiful
in its proportions and in its simplicity. 7

As soon as the house was done, in April 1873, they were
off again for Belgrade and Constantinople. Lady Anne had
never been to the Levant, Blunt had already felt its charm,
and the adventures of Childe Harold urged them on.

At Constantinople they were drawn immediately into the
agreeable life of the diplomatic circle but the change of climate
soon took its toll and Blunt, in only indifferent health when
they left England, came down with a sharp attack of pneu-
monia. That crisis over, the doctors pronounced him to be
suffering from galloping consumption. They gave him only a
few weeks to live. With the high spirit characteristic of him
he determined to enjoy the little time left him. Scarcely able
to get about, he went to the At-Mai'dan, the great horse market

1873-1874 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 61

of Istambul, bought half a dozen pack horses, gathered
together supplies, and accompanied by the usual semi-military
escort and an Armenian dragoman, crossed with Lady Anne
to Scutari. Thence they started on six summer weeks of
pleasant wandering. One of Blunt’s lungs hardened and
ceased to be of any use for the rest of his life, but the other,
though not whole, did the work of four ordinary lungs.

Needless to say they left the beaten tracks of tourists and
journeyed whither fancy and the advice of those they met along
the road directed. Their interest now and always was less in
the ancient monuments and natural beauties of the land in
which they travelled than in its inhabitants and their manner
of living. They made a point of talking with the peasants as
much as was possible through their dragoman interpreter,
returning from their journey with strong impressions that they
later proved to their own satisfaction to be just. In common
with most Englishmen in 1873 they sympathized with the
Turks rather than with the Christians of the Ottoman Empire;
and like most travellers in Asia Minor, they were impressed
with the ‘honest goodness’ of the inhabitants of Turkey and
the badness of their government.

Obviously the peasants were oppressed by taxation and
unjust fiscal demands. They complained of hardships imposed
by the government and looked upon the Blunts with envy as
the subjects of an Empire wherein everyone was free and
unoppressed. Yet the method of government had a good deal
to be said for it: the poor were not persecuted and personal
freedom existed as it does not in better regulated lands. The
liberty enjoyed in a tyrannically misgoverned country was
sufficiently paradoxical to appeal to Blunt and gave rise to
bitter reflection — the earliest that, later, he could remember
making with regard to Eastern countries.

This awakening suspicion that the East had something to
teach in the way of government was intensified by the Blunts’
experience in Algeria early in the following year when they
rode over the great Haifa desert, visiting the oases between

62

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1874-1875

Laghouat and Biskra in the French Sahara. In the towns
they found the Mohammedan natives oppressed by the civil
administration of the Christians who had conquered them in
the uprising after the Prussian War and confiscated their
property. The natives were now living like the foreign settlers
in an ‘ignoble squalor’ repellent to the Blunts. The Arabs in
the Sahara beyond the Atlas, on the other hand, whose
vigorous way of life the French military officers esteemed, had
been allowed to retain their wealth and much of their ancient
pride. The Blunts, travelling with an Armenian Christian
interpreter who despised the Arabs and a French-speaking
Spahi guide ‘who browbeat and affronted them’, made no
friends among them — nor did they at that time particularly
want to. But the patriarchal life of the desert Arabs among
camel herds and horses and memories of heroic deeds charmed
Blunt. To his ardent imagination it seemed noble and free
and to be threatened by the greed of ‘civilized’ society to which
the town dwellers had already succumbed. The corrupting
effect of Western civilization upon Mohammedan natives ‘was
a new political lesson’, he wrote years later, ‘which I took to
heart, though still regarding it as in no sense my personal
affair ’. 8

3

Before Blunt took the next important step in his political
education a year of travel in France and Italy intervened which
he devoted to interests far removed from problems of national
government and especially to poetry. He not only wrote many
poems at this time, such as the sonnets to Juliet, but, in response
to Lytton’s urging and Mrs. Pollen’s encouragement, pre-
pared his poems for a first publication. Mrs. Pollen herself
was something of a poet — the series entitled ‘A Woman’s
Sonnets’ among Blunt’s collected poems was probably written
by her — and so, like Lytton, is an influence to be reckoned
with in Blunt’s poetry.

i 8y 5 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 63

The small yellow volume of Songs and Sonnets by Proteus
that appeared in 1875 h a d gilded on its cover the sun’s face
and rays with the inscription ‘By thy light I live’. The device,
repeated on later collections of Blunt’s poems, is appropriate
to verse remarkable for naturalness and strength of expression.
It is true that the narratives and allegories, written mainly in
the early ’sixties, and the songs are often sentimental and
derivative. The song at the end of ‘A Rhapsody’, exquisite
as it is, echoes the Indian maid’s song in Endymion. ‘Pictures
on Enamel’ bears the stamp of Victorian romance — the very
names Astraled, Somandalin, give it away; and ‘Recollections
of Childhood’ escapes only here and there from Victorian
sweet-prettiness. But in all the longer poems passages of fresh
observation speak with Blunt’s authentic voice, the voice of
the sonnets.

Blunt’s sonnets have the vitality of things grown out-of-
doors in full daylight with no suggestion of literary forcing
about them. They spring directly from strong feeling as in
the exigent

Give me thy heart, Juliet, give me thy heart!

I have a need of it, an absolute need,

Because my own heart has thus long been dead.

I live but by thy life. The very smart
Of this new pain which has been born of thee
Is thine, thy own great pleasure’s counterpart.

The simple abrupt speech enforcing the sincerity of the
emotion is characteristic, even to the bad rhymes ‘need’ and
‘dead’. Such he would admit occasionally as well as doubtful
syntax if thereby he could express himself more honestly. For
the same reason he experimented with the sonnet form, adding
lines, varying the rhyme scheme and substituting assonance
for rhyme. Fortunately his poetic talent equalled his zeal for
truth. Ease and grace of style were native to him. Often, as
in the lovely line

Clear as the pale green edge where dawn began,

64 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1875

his pen seems to write for him. But he can be ingenious when
he wants to arrest attention, as in the figure of youth’s thoughts

Cutting the horizon of experience
Sharp as an obelisk,

or rise to grandeur —

This is the sublime
To be alone with eagles in the air —

or express bitter passion by sound as significant as the image
itself:

We planted love, and lo it bred a brood
Of lusts and vanities and senseless joys.

The rich experience behind his sonnets, Blunt maintained,
gave them their ultimate value, a philosophy derived not from
the closet but straight from life. Man’s salvation, in his view,
was to live intensely, to obey his instinct, to seize pleasure when
it comes —

pleasure which was so divine a thing
The sweetest and most strange to understand.

Pleasure to Blunt is love. It waits but for a moment

As though a wild bird suddenly should stay
A moment at our side and we should find,

When we looked up, that it had taken wings,

but on it depends the sweetness of memory the only thing that
makes age tolerable. And, just as ‘love in pain is sweetest
love’, so the memory of pleasure is most poignant if love has
been cut off at fullest bloom, not tinged with death in gradual
fading.

I should have slain my love in its full pride,

So had it lived and been forever mine,

A treasure for all time to ponder on,

1 8 7 5 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 65

Laid up for aye in old Time’s palaces,

A Thing of beauty’, which my soul had won,

And death had made undying with a kiss.

Death, impending fate, the passing of time haunt Blunt’s
thoughts.

It may be, for a little space of years
We conquer fate and half forget our tears.

Then youth vanishes and ‘doubts beset us’, old age is upon us,
‘the Gaul is at the gate’ : all that man has been and dreamed
of being must die. Were this not so he would long since have
become God Himself for he has power over everything in the
universe except death. Death makes a mockery of life— ‘O who
would live again to suffer loss?’

Time is more to Blunt than a rhetorical theme. Its power
is the key to his attitude towards life and is summed up in
one of his finest sonnets :

I long have had a quarrel set with Time
Because he robbed me. Every day of life
Was wrested from me after bitter strife.

I never yet could see the sun go down

But I was angry in my heart, nor hear

The leaves fall in the wind without a tear

Over the dying summer. I have known

No truce with Time nor, Time’s accomplice, Death.

The fair world is the witness of a crime

Repeated every hour. For life and breath

Are sweet to all who live; and bitterly

The voices of these robbers of the heath

Sound in each ear and chill the passer-by.

What have we done to thee, thou monstrous Time?
What have we done to Death that we must die?

4

The next six years of Blunt’s life contributed step by step

66 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1875-1876

to the growth of his political creed. By the end of that time it
was fully defined.

In the winter of 1875-6 the Blunts paid their first visit to
Egypt, a visit seemingly of no greater moment than others, yet
marking the first step in the connection that was later to be so
close and so important both to Blunt and to Egypt. The
Egyptian— Abyssinian campaign then in progress prevented
their following out of their first plan of entering from the
south by way of Suakim, Kassala and the Blue Hills and of
working their way northwards to Cairo in the spring. Deter-
mined not to approach Egypt in the normal fashion, from
Alexandria, they gathered together the camping equipment
prepared for the longer trip, landed at Suez, hired camels and
Bedouin camelmen, and took the old caravan route to Cairo.
Now that the old route has been made into a much-frequented
automobile road their journey seems singularly unadventurous,
but at the time it was less often travelled. Their impressions
had the advantage of comparative freshness.

Five days with the camelmen gave them their first practical
lessons in Arabic and laid the basis for relations that were later
to become so pleasant and so intimate with the Arabian desert
tribes. On the fifth morning they entered Cairo and made
camp at Abasiyeh, all unknowingly behind the targets of the
troops. Little did they think, when bullets of soldiers at target
practice began surprisingly to whistle past them and they
discovered the mistake they had made, that they would ever
be interested in those Egyptian soldiers as a fighting army.

In Cairo they stopped only one day, pressing on over the
Kasr-el-Nil bridge towards the Pyramids, forcing the camelmen
to ‘break the tribal rule which forbade them as Bedouins of the
Eastern desert to cross over to the West’ — an injustice which
they did not fully understand or repent of till much later. They
camped close to ‘the little fellah village of Tolbiya, the last
but one before the Pyramids are reached’. The villagers,
accustomed to regard Frankish travellers only as their prey,
were obliged to accord hospitality to the Blunts who had

1875-1876 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 67

alighted for the night as guests, for the Bedouin law of hos-
pitality is exacting. These enforced friendly relations served
as an introduction to other villages which the Blunts managed
to visit despite the fact that their camelmen refused to penetrate
further into the Western desert.

The villagers talked openly with the Blunts. They looked
on the English as friends, as more honest and politically dis-
interested than other Franks, and welcomed the rumour of a
possible intervention in the government by the English. ‘They
did not suspect,’ Blunt wrote years later, ‘the immense com-
mercial selfishness which led us, collectively as a nation, to so
many aggressions on the weak races of the world.’ Nor did
Blunt himself at that time suspect it; the bitterness of tone is
of later growth. ‘I was as yet,’ he admitted, ‘though not
perhaps even then enthusiastically so, a believer in the common
English creed that England had a providential mission in the
East, and that our wars were only waged there for honest and
beneficent reasons. Nothing was further from my mind than
that we English ever could be guilty, as a nation, of a great
betrayal of justice in arms for our mere selfish interests ... I
had no other thought for the Egyptians than that they should
share with India, which I had not yet seen, the privilege of
our protection.’

Indeed, there was need of protection of some sort. The
fellahin were in dire poverty in this first of the three last years
of the Khedive Ismail’s reign. European bondholders were
clamouring for their coupons : taxpayers down to the poorest
were squeezed; in the country even the sheykhs had few of
them a respectable cloak to wear; and in the provincial towns
on market-days the place was full of women selling clothes and
silver ornaments to Greek usurers to get money to pay the
tax collectors. Blunt ‘bought their poor trinkets and listened
to their stories, and joined them in their maledictions on a
government which was laying them bare’. With Words-
worthian faith he believed in the nobility and sincerity of those
near the land; the fellahin, moreover, were oppressed by

68 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1876

foreign tyrants. He could not but hope that the better govern-
ment of which they were worthy would come. It had not
occurred to him as yet that he himself could do anything to
bring it about.

Returning to Cairo in March 1876, they found Cave’s
financial mission arrived and established. From its members
— among whom were Blunt’s old acquaintances Vivian Buckley
of the Foreign Office, and Sir Rivers Wilson — and from the
British Consul General, Colonel Staunton, they learned some-
thing of the condition of financial affairs and something of the
state of government.

Blunt’s last memory of that winter at Cairo was of a bar-
barically gorgeous banquet given by the Viceroy Ismai '1 to the
head of the financial mission, Mr. Cave, later Sir Stephen Cave,
in the Viceregal kiosque which still mars the desert at the foot
of the Great Pyramid. The financial brunt of the feast fell
upon the taxpayer, the fellahin; yet Cave, the commissioner
of a foreign race, in whose honour the feast had been made,
was there only to save the fellahin from ruin. Not until years
afterwards did Blunt recognize in this paradox twin causes of
revolution.

With the return of spring came the necessity of going
north out of the heat of Cairo. Blunt and Lady Anne set forth
with their camels and tents and Bedouins across the Suez Canal,
through the Sinai Peninsula and on by Akabah to Jerusalem —
their first visit to ‘the confines of Arabia’ and their first glimpse
of Mount Sinai of which Blunt wrote years later:

The rock of Horeb is the holiest place
Of all earth’s holies. In the wilderness

It stands with its gaunt head bare to the heaven
As when God spake with Moses face to face.

Red in the eternal sunset of the years,

Crowned with a glory the world’s evening wears,

Where evening is with morning a first day
Unchanged in the mute music of the spheres.

i87"6 MARRIAGE, POETRY AND TRAVEL 69

From base to top the boulder crags high thrown

Fortress the plain which Israel camped upon,

A living presence in the unliving waste,

A couchant lion with a mane of stone.

It was customary then for tourists to go from Egypt to Syria
by desert instead of by sea route. It was very unusual, how-
ever, for those unable to speak the language to travel without
a dragoman. As a result of such temerity the Blunts encountered
perilous adventures. Through ignorance of Arab customs they
offended a sheykh outside Akabah so bitterly that they were
refused escort and guides. Their sole supporters were their
camel-drivers, two Arab boys from Sinai who knew almost
nothing of the northern country. For several days they ran
short of water, being totally ignorant of where the wells lay.
When, in the nick of time, they stumbled by sheer good luck
upon a well, in their eagerness to drink they lost their heads
and rushed for the water forgetting that strict Bedouin custom
demanded that they ask permission of the Arabs already
encamped there. Fortunately they succeeded in patching up
the quarrel which had threatened to become dangerous and
in reaching a tribe of Arabs friendly with their two camel-men.
With them they encamped for some days and Blunt first became
really interested in the Arabs as individuals. A Bedouin youth
confided to him his love affairs, tie persuaded Blunt to write
a letter for him declaring that he would die if the father of the
girl whom he loved refused to give her for the three camels he
offered. Blunt ‘began to suspect that these wild people were
men with like passions with ourselves’. When he parted from
the camel-drivers at Jerusalem he entrusted them with the task
of taking his camels back to Cairo and of selling them there
for him. Six months later he received the full price. It was
brought home to him that ‘some Arabs at least were as honest
men as ourselves’.

On their way home to England early in the summer Blunt
recalled their thirsty march through the desert, and the bliss

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

70

1876

of coming suddenly upon a well, in the sonnet, ‘The Oasis of
Sidi Khaled’ :

How the earth burns ! Each pebble underfoot
Is as a living thing with power to wound.

The white sand quivers, and the footfall mute
Of the slow camels strikes but gives no sound,

As though they walked on flame, not solid ground.
’Tis noon, and the beasts’ shadows even have fled
Back to their feet, and there is fire around
And fire beneath, and overhead the sun.

Pitiful heaven ! What is this we view?

Tall trees, a river, pools, where swallows fly,
Thickets of oleander where doves coo,

Shades, deep as midnight, greenness for tired eyes.
Hark, how the light winds in the palm-tops sigh.
Oh this is rest. Oh this is paradise.

CHAPTER IV

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

r

The Blunts had returned from Arabia dissatisfied with the
superficiality of their experience there. They determined to
make another journey in the following winter, 1877—8, that
would give them a fuller knowledge of the Arabic language and
customs and of the workings of the Eastern mind. But when
they tried to prepare for it, no one could tell them how to reach
their objective, Central Arabia. At the Royal Geographical
Society there were no maps later than Colonel Chesney’s
of 1837; and no information was to be had about routes and
methods. They were advised to see Sir Henry Layard. He
suggested their taking a comfortable steamer from the point on
the Euphrates nearest Aleppo to Bagdad — Cook’s Tourist
Agency would tell them the exact route. The Euphrates
valley caravan road was dangerous, he said; and he warned
them against the effects of the Turko— Bulgarian war then
raging. Armenia was reported to be full of lawless dis-
banded troops and its soldiers and policemen all away at the
war.

But Cook’s Agency, they found, knew nothing of river
steamers, comfortable or otherwise, to Bagdad. No one knew
anything definite. Undismayed, Blunt affirmed that the
sensational tales were all nonsense, that Aleppo was not in
Armenia, and that the last place a beaten army would retreat
to would be the Syrian desert. He added, moreover, that if
plague existed in Bagdad so did small-pox in London. Lady
Anne, swept on by his enthusiasm, agreed; and, as it hap-
pened, the moment for such a journey turned out to be really

71

72 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1877

very good: the Syrians hailed the absence of police and soldiers
as a blessing and their Turkish governors, in misfortune, were
ready to be friendly with anyone.

Taking ship from Marseilles, the Blunts landed at Alex-
andretta and provided themselves with Hajji Mahmoud, a fat
Syrian, as cavass, and with the necessary supplies and horses
to take them on to Aleppo. Wrapped in heavy Bedouin cloaks
and headgear they struggled through the freezing winter rains,
warming themselves around the fire with other travellers, com-
mercial Syrians and lean Arabs and young men off to the war
in the crowded, noisy, vermin-cat-and-chicken ridden Khans;
rolling up, dog-tired, on their appointed space of wooden
sleeping platform; off at cock crow for another battle through
the mud. Four days of this and they arrived thankfully
at the comparative luxury of the British Consulate at
Aleppo.

For a month or more torrential rains held them fast bound.
Most travellers would have passed the time in sight-seeing; not
so the Blunts. They could hardly persuade themselves to visit
even the citadel, but they took great interest in a visit to the
gaol and gave a ‘few pennies’ to the prisoner who had been
there longest — a man of singularly unattractive appearance.
The officials seemed offended and Blunt explained their inten-
tion to be merely charitable. ‘That is very well,’ replied the
governor, ‘and I perfectly understand your feeling; but it
should have been a piece of gold, not silver. A crown piece
was unworthy a gentleman of the Bey’s distinction.’ The Blunts
were learning the etiquette of the East.

In the event the delay at Aleppo proved to be of great
advantage, for the British Consul, Skene, a courageous and
adventurous traveller himself, had lived thirty years in Arabia,
and few places or tribes in the desert west of the Euphrates
were unknown to him. 1 His practical experience of the Bedouins
seems to have confirmed the romantic impression of them that
Blunt had obtained in his travels of the preceding year and
that he expressed in a sonnet written at Christmas at Aleppo :

73

i 8 7 7 IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

Yours is the rain and sunshine, and the way
Of an old wisdom by our world forgot,

The courage of a day which knew not death.

Well may we sons of Japhet in dismay
Pause in our vain mad fight for life and breath
Beholding you. I bow and reason not.

It was owing to Skene’s help and information that the Blunts
were able to fulfil their wish to visit the desert tribes. He
told them of the Shammar who inhabited the desert of Meso-
potamia and whom he did not know personally; and of the
Anazeh who had their summer quarters to the west of the
Euphrates and with whose tribes and sheykhs he was on
friendly terms. In the winter they migrated southward to
somewhere in the region of Jebel Shammar and Nejd, exactly
where was not known.

Encouraged by Skene who said it would not be dangerous
or difficult, if they had enough fortitude and patience to put
up with the hardships of desert life and the slow progress of
Bedouins on the march, the Blunts decided to join the Anazeh
who were still in their summer quarters and march southwards
with them. A desert hero of great war fame, Jedaan, sheykh
of the Sebaa, a tribe of the Anazeh, loomed large in the
Consul’s tales. The picturesque deeds of this Rob Roy of the
desert caught the Blunts’ imagination. With Skene’s promise
of an introduction to him they expanded their first meagre
plan of going down the river to Bagdad into the wider scheme
of a systematic progress through the Bedouin tribes beginning
with a visit to Jedaan. He and his tribes were said to be some-
where near Deyr, a small town on the Euphrates caravan
route.

While the rains fell, plans were laid with the Consul to start
as soon as possible. Blunt again hired Hajji Mahmoud, who
had brought them with his mules from Alexandretta, to serve
until they should reach the tribes and would need camels for
actual desert work; engaged as cook an excitable little Chris-

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

74

1877-1878

dan, Hanna, much given to tears but courageous and faithful ;
and at the market purchased mares for Lady Anne and himself
to ride. Lady Anne with the help of three Hebrews manu-
factured a tent according to a pattern already tested by the
Blunts, and freshly stuffed the saddles. Bullets were run from
the moulds in extra number since if fighting were to take place
while they were with Jedaan, Blunt would be expected to take
his share; and supplies were bought including cloaks and
boots, sugar and tobacco to be used as gifts to the Bedouin
sheykhs. By the end of December, when the rains ceased,
everything was ready, and on January 9 th the party, accom-
panied by Skene who had agreed to go with them as far as
Deyr, set off.

At Deyr they were delayed day after day by the polite
attentions of the Turkish Governor, Huseyn Pasha, who hoped
by loading them with civilities to prevent them from joining
Jedaan as they wished. The policy of the Turkish government
was to keep the Bedouins, of whose intrigues it was always
jealous, as ignorant as children of all that was passing in the
outer world, and to sow dissension among them. It held to the
old effective ‘divide and rule’. Moreover, what could be more
likely than that England, who was known to have her eye on
the Euphrates in the event of a Bulgarian victory, should have
sent the Blunts to spy out the land? Undoubtedly a British
Consul had political motives for accompanying them so far from
his post. So they were held in honourable captivity, given a
guard of honour to attend them everywhere and warned against
ghaztis or raiding parties.

They were bored. Even the nearby Euphrates lost its
dignity at Deyr and the town itself, embellished by an enter-
prising pasha, was ‘a grotesque imitation of a European
faubourg ’ . But it was a well-known horse market where not
only some of the best blood in Asia could be seen but a
guarantee of authenticity could be procured as was not possible
in ordinary circumstances at Damascus and Aleppo. They
amused themselves, as they did wherever they went, by

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

1878

75

examining the horses and making judicious purchases. Not-
withstanding, the restricted town life fretted them, Blunt
especially. They welcomed any excitement — news of raids
and, as an adventure, a fall of Lady Anne’s with her horse into
a deep pit in the street. Finally, with the proviso that they
would go direct to Bagdad and make no effort to reach Jedaan,
they were allowed to depart. Skene, promising to meet them
on their return to Deyr about March r yth, returned to Aleppo.
The Blunts, in company with a caravan of mules and horses
carrying bales of cotton and two Turkish ladies penned up
like fowls in an immense pair of panniers that lurched along "
like a ship at sea, started for Bagdad.

2

For a little more than a fortnight they travelled through the
river marshes and tamarisk woods, and across the dry wady
Hauran. Blunt must have remembered these days later when
making his ‘Translations from the Arabic’ :

I climbed down from my watch tower of the rocks
To where the tamarisks grow, and the dwarf palms. . . .

I sought them in the foldings of the hill,

In the deep hollows shut with rocks, where no winds blow;
I sought their footstep under the tall cliffs,

Shut from the storms, where the first lambs are born.

Along the old caravan route they met few Bedouins. The
Arabs with whom they had to do were half shepherd, half
ploughmen — fellahin Arabs — not the independent brave
fellows whom they wished to find. The villagers with whom
they became acquainted occasionally gave them eggs and ewes’
milk to vary their desert fare and pressed them to stay in the
villages. But however windy and bitter the night — and it was
cuttingly cold, snowy even for a short time — and however for-
biddingly the jackals and wolves might howl, Blunt insisted

76 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1878

on camping in their own tent whenever possible. He preferred
its cleanliness and comparative quiet to communal life in the
hovels of small village sheykhs, and for the animals grazing in
the open.

On arriving at Bagdad the Blunts’ first thought was how to
get out of it. The British Residency itself where they stayed
was delightful — an old house built around two large courtyards
and furnished in the elaborate taste of eighteenth-century
Persia except for the dining-room which, in deference to Anglo-
Indian prejudice, was kept as studiously English as if it had
been done by Maple. From its terrace overlooking the river
an alley of old orange trees led through the cool and shabby
garden to a little kiosk and the Residency quay. The town
however, owing chiefly to loss of trade, plague, and the
‘modern improvements’ — including the razing of the city
walls — instituted by Midhat Pasha whose acquaintance they
were to make the following year, had been shorn of all its
ancient glory.

The Blunts employed themselves as at Deyr and Aleppo in
examining the horses that the town had to offer and in prepar-
ing for their further travels. They restocked their supplies,
purchased four fine young camels, a delul or she dromedary,
and a white ass for Hanna’s gratification; and they hired two
honest camelmen and a fat cavass who had to be helped onto
his horse and proved a most impractical traveller though good
humoured and willing to do his duty.

Colonel Nixon, the British Resident, gave them much
valuable information; and the English doctor took them to
call on his friend, the dispossessed and pensioned King of
Oude, an old Indian Nawab remarkable for his birth, his
wealth, and the dignity of his private character. With him the
Blunts made fast friends. He was agreeable and witty and
understood European as well as Eastern thought, for he had
travelled much and was a philosopher. Though his way of life
was simple, his position at Bagdad was great — a combination
sympathetic to Blunt’s aristocratic inclinations. All the more

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

1878

77

important Bedouin sheykhs were well known to him and he
offered to give the Blunts letters to a number of them. He also
invited the Blunts to make one of his country houses the
starting-point of their journey, so that they could leave
Bagdad unbeknownst to the Valy who, like the Pasha of Deyr,
was bound to do his best to prevent them from visiting the
tribes.

At the end of a fortnight, taking advantage of the Nawab’s
offer, they started on the second lap of their journey. Blunt,
Lady Anne wrote, was ‘perfectly happy, being once more “in
his own tent”, and having, besides, his own camels and his
own servants, and no guards or policemen to vex him’. He at
any rate ‘felt quite at home in the desert’. Lady Anne, on her
side, was less confident, for the more dangerous part of their
march lay still before them and they had no guide. Mesopo-
tamia, she wrote, ‘at least this part of it, has never, as far as I
know, been crossed by a European in its whole breadth, or in
modern times even by a townsman from Bagdad or Aleppo;
and the desert south of the Sinjar hills is quite new ground’.

3

Their journey to the desert where the Shammar and sub-
sidiary Bedouin tribes were encamped, led then north-north-
west across a desolate plain cut by the mounds of ancient
Babylonian canals and inhabited only by gazelles and birds of
prey. Travellers whom they met tried to turn them back,
misguided and misdirected them, their servants were terrified,
but they persevered. Blunt was happy. He was now to know
the Bedouins in their own black tents, to live the life of the
desert himself. From the ponds and brushwood he brought
to bag geese and ducks and francolins and even wild boar; and
he learned to grub up desert truffles ( 'kemeyeh ) with which
Hanna varied their meagre fare of dates and bread.

At last they came to a great Bedouin encampment. The

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

78

1878

sheykh, the first true Bedouin sheykh encountered by them, had
a rollicking devil-may-care way of looking and talking. He
feasted them on an abominably bad meal of boiled unseasoned
sheep and black coffee. Blunt felt rather shy on this first visit
to the tents, arriving as a stranger and unannounced, but
following the procedure which Skene had told him was proper
to such occasions he carried it off gallantly.

By this time — though Blunt himself never became as pro-
ficient as Lady Anne — they had learned to speak Arabic well
enough to carry on a conversation with fair ease. Wisely they
had adopted a dress that was a mixture of Arabian and Euro-
pean. A wholly Bedouin dress would have cost them the
prestige of a strange nationality. Over their English clothes
they wore Bedouin cloaks to protect them against rain and sun
and on their heads the coiled turban that fellah Arabs wear and
that was more useful than the Bedouin kejiyeh or scarf. It
could be turned into a pillow, or unwound as a girdle or rope,
or torn up into a bandage. Altogether they presented an
appearance not unsuited to desert travelling. Lady Anne’s
side-saddle seemed to the Arabs merely a shedad or dehil’s
saddle quixotically placed on a mare. Her skill in horseman-
ship and practical arts and her courage made her easily
acceptable. Blunt, tall and aquiline, intensely alive but bearing
himself with the haughty dignity of their own sheykhs, they
recognized as one to revere. Doubtless his magnetism and his
beauty — he reminded one, his friends say, of a fine arab horse
with his look of sensitive high spirit and breeding — cast its
spell upon them as upon other men. His courage and his
horsemanship won their admiration and, more than all, his
shooting. His ready acceptance of their manners and customs
and his quick sympathy gave them personal confidence in him.

He in his turn sincerely admired their independence, ‘their
dignified simplicity’ and high spirit. He, who was so impatient
of his English peers, was tolerance itself toward the Bedouins ;
for they lived, it seemed to him, up to their own standards,
making no pretences and with little material prosperity to aid

1878 IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY 79

them. Having found that ‘a soft word with them or still better
a merry one’ turned away their wrath, he managed them with
a light hand. Though they were ‘unwise in the world’s learn-
ing’, he felt that they had

gleams

Of subtler instinct than the vain world deems,
Glimpses of faiths transmitted from afar
In signs and wonders and revealed in dreams.

And the willingness he showed to learn from them, persuaded
them to pass on to him their practical lore.

They taught me their strange knowledge, how to read
The forms celestial ordered to Man’s need,

To count on sand the arrow heads of fate
And mark the birds’ flight and the grey hare’s speed.

It was knowledge that proved invaluable to him on many a
future expedition.

As they went across the desert from sheykh to sheykh the
Blunts realized that the person whom they would be most
interested in seeing was Faris, one of the two rival sheykhs of
the Shammar tribe. To reach him was no easy matter; but
when, finally, they succeeded they found in him what they had
‘been looking for, but hardly hoped to get a sight of, a gentle-
man of the desert’, perfectly well bred, frank and cordial. Hewas
twenty-seven years old, small, lithe and graceful, his complexion
not darker than that of a Spaniard and his features typically
Arabian: an aquiline nose, black eyebrows almost meeting
across his forehead, and eyes fringed round with long black
lashes. His smile was peculiarly sweet. But it was his manner
toward his people, that of the true aristocrat, which won
Blunt’s heart. He was respectful to the old and unpretending
with his equals among whom his personal qualities gave him so
much ascendancy that he could afford to be familiar without
losing his dignity. As a result his tribe adored him.

80 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1878

With other Bedouins the Blunts’ relations had been friendly;
with Faris they quickly became affectionate. Blunt and Faris
swore the oath of brotherhood : ‘they took hold of each other
by the girdle with their left hands,’ Lady Anne wrote, ‘and,
holding their right hands as appealing to heaven, they repeated
the prescribed form of words very seriously, for this is a pleclge
no Bedouin ever takes lightly. . . . This pledge of brotherhood,
once taken, cannot be dissolved. It binds the swearers to be
henceforth brothers, as though born of the same mother, in all
things except that it is no bar to marriage of the one with near
relations of the other. Personal combat is henceforth not
allowed, even if the tribes of the two brothers should after-
wards be at war; nor can the property of a brother be seized
by the brother or by any of his people. The swearers have, on
the contrary, a right to aid and assistance in case of need; and
a brother, if called upon is bound to avenge his brother’s
quarrel.’

‘There was something so impressive in the ceremony that,
for some minutes after it was over we all three sat without
speaking . . . News of the oath was imparted to the Sheykh’s
household and when Wilfrid entered the great tent . . . they
all stood up and the eldest made a little speech to the effect that
this tent and all the Shammar tents were his, Wilfrid’s, and
their camels and sheep and all they had.’ The Hatoun Amsheh,
the Sheykh’s mother, sent for Lady Anne, kissed her and said
that she was now her mother too, and if the Blunts were ever
in any difficulty, Inshallah, her son would help them. ‘I am
sure these are not mere empty words,’ added Lady Anne.

When they departed on March 1 9th Faris sent with them
a boy Ghanim as camel-driver, ‘a strange wild-looking youth,
with a merry smile, white teeth, and a peculiar glitter in his
eyes, which were half green, half hazel, like a cat’s, while long
wisps and plaits of hair hung all about his face in picturesque
confusion. There was something singularly attractive in his
manner; and his voice had a caressing, supplicating tone’. He
was intelligent and willing, and could turn his hand to any-

1878 IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY 81

thing. Best of all he beguiled the drearier stretches of their
journey and their evenings with songs of departed heroes
improvised to chords and discords on a little fiddle made of
parchment, its bow strung with horse-hair. The songs echoed
thin and remote in the clear air across the desert.

In return Blunt offered to give Faris his rifle or pistol. ‘No,*
said the Sheykh, ‘I am better as my fathers were’ — a remark
which must have gone straight to Blunt’s heart. Besides, Faris
felt that he could accept no present since he had no colt or filly
to give Blunt in accordance with Bedouin custom. ‘All I can
do for you is this. My people shall make you the raft you will
require for crossing the Khabur [a tributary to the Euphrates;
a broad stream and difficult to cross]. They would not do it
for the Pasha, or even for the Sultan, for it is fellahin work,
fit only for the Jiburi, but they will do it for you, because, you
see, you are one of us.’

True to his word, Faris and his people saw the Blunts safely
across the river, a nerve-wracking procedure which thoroughly
frightened Lady Anne whose one fear was of water. The
animals were swum across ; the Blunts and their servants were
taken over on a square raft of goatskins blown up like bladders
and tied together with a slight framework of tamarisk boughs,
‘the most rickety looking thing’, remarked Lady Anne sharply,
‘ever people trusted themselves to on deep water’. The
Bedouins enjoyed themselves thoroughly, shouting and laugh-
ing and playing tricks to frighten the travellers. But it was all
good natured and in the end successful. The Arabs’ farewells
were repeated and enthusiastic: ‘Our tribe is your tribe, our
tents your tents. Come back to us soon, and we will make
you tents, and give you camels and mares. You shall live
with us every winter, and in summer, when it is hot, you
shall have a stone house to retire to at Deyr.’ Once safely
across the river the Blunts were off again on the short trip
back to Deyr, longing to see Skene, who was to meet them
there with letters and news of Europe, and to tell him their
adventures.

82

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1878

4

But no Skene was at Deyr when they arrived, and they were
greeted by the old stubborn opposition on the part of the
governor to their going among the tribes. Indeed the Pasha,
displeased with them for having already travelled so far, was
more than ever determined to prevent their reaching Jedaan.
Again for some days he held them captive by his civilities.
Again their efforts to get into communication with the Anazeh
sheikh were fruitless. They were permitted to leave the town
only under the pretence of going straight to Tudmur, ancient
Palmyra — a pretence made a reality perforce by the governor’s
sending along a guide and an armed guard ‘to protect them’.

With the guide, Mohammed-Ibn-Aruk, son of the sheykh
of Tudmur, six feet tall and very handsome, Blunt soon struck
up a friendship. Mohammed took him to visit a tribe of
robbers with whom he had a most enjoyable time drinking
coffee and chatting; and when they arrived at Tudmur
Mohammed and all his family devoted themselves to entertain-
ing the travellers hospitably. But he would not commit himself
to leading them to Jedaan, who was reported to be with his
tribe a little way southward. In desperation Blunt ‘got him to
the top of the Temple of the Sun’ and there, with no other
ears to hear, put it to him direct, would he or would he not
take them to Jedaan. Mohammed said he would. The Pasha
of Deyr was far away; Blunt with his eloquence and promise of
reward was on the spot. Despite the war which they knew was
raging between the Roala and Jedaan’s tribe, the Sebaa, and
the oppressive heat — the desert southward looked like a
simmering furnace — Blunt would have been elated had Skene
only been with them to give them an introduction to Jedaan.
Save for that all their plans were in a fair way to accomplish-
ment.

Suddenly, on the very day they were to begin the march,
word came that Skene was approaching. He had been detained
unexpectedly at Aleppo and, learning that they had left Deyr,

j 8 7 8 IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY 83

had followed them direct to Tudmur. He brought with him
two new mares for the Blunts, one of which, Sherifa, proved
a treasure later in England. Of her might have been written
the very Arabian catalogue spoken by Abu Zeyd in Blunt’s
poem, The Stealing of the Mare :

The grey mare, the renowned: in the world there is none
like her,

Not with the Persian kings, the Chosroes, the Irani.

Spare is her head and lean, her ears set close together;

Her forelock is a net, her forehead a lamp lighted,

Illumining the tribe, her neck curved like a palm branch,

Her wither clean and sharp. Upon her chest and throttle
An amulet hangs of gold. Her forelegs are twin lances.

Her hoofs fly forward faster even than flies the whirlwind.
Her tail bone held aloft, yet the hairs sweep the gravel;

Her height twice eight, sixteen, taller than all the horses.
Here are her virtues told in full enumeration,

Dear to her master’s eye as gold and precious jewels.

At last they came up with Jedaan. But one interview and
their hopes were dashed. The only mark that distinguished
him as a great man was his eyes, ‘hawk’s eyes, piercing, fierce
and cold’. Owing to the war and to the fact that two days
before the Blunts arrived he had been married for the fifteenth
time, he was somewhat preoccupied in manner. Blunt thought
him ill-bred and boorish, a parvenu who had won his position
solely by his merit as a man of action and a politician, and
refused to accompany him on a great raiding party, against the
enemy tribe. He was interested all the same in the fantasia
which Jedaan gave in their honour, and in the hawking of a
bustard and the coursing of a fox by small greyhounds.

To Jedaan’s credit, be it said, several remarks made by Lady
Anne on the folly of letting petty squabbles over pasturage
divide the strength of the tribes struck him with such force
that he asked her to undertake a diplomatic mission to his
enemies the Roala, whose camp lay on the way to Damascus,

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

84

1878

in the hope of bringing about peace between them and his tribe
of the Sebaa. This she agreed to do, the more readily as it
proved a welcome excuse for leaving Jedaan.

For some distance they marched with the Gomussa, a tribe
subsidiary to Jedaan ’s but still important. The sheykh of the
tribe was a poor creature. His nephew Meshur Ibn Meshid,
however, a young man renowned for warlike deeds of heroism,
of agreeable countenance and charming manners, soon won
Blunt’s liking. As they sat together in the tent on the evening
before Blunt’s departure from the tribe, Blunt admired a pair
of silver-hilted pistols hanging at Meshur’s girdle. ‘Without
more ado Meshur unbuckled them,’ wrote Lady Anne in her
diary, ‘and handed them to Wilfrid, insisting that he should
keep them. Wilfrid was pleased at the manner in which he did
this, but answered that he could not accept them unless
Meshur would in turn accept his revolver, and, moreover,
become his brother. Both proposals were very joyfully
accepted.’ So Blunt gained another brother among the
Bedouins and, to preserve the family intact, made Meshur
promise never to use the revolver against Faris.

Leaving the Gomussa they pushed their way toward the
sheykh of the Roala, Sotamn, with their proposals of peace
from Jedaan. Sotamn, a gentle old man, agreed to them, but
was evidently too weak to lead or govern his people so that
the proposals, at least for the time being, could come to nothing.
But the first glimpse of the Roala camp had repaid the Blunts
for their trouble. Quite suddenly, crossing a low ridge, they
looked over the plain covered in all directions with a countless
multitude of tents and men and mares and camels to the lake
of Saighal glittering white in the sun ten miles away. It was
‘the most wonderful spectacle the desert has to show,’ wrote
Lady Anne. ‘I felt an emotion of almost awe, as when one first
sees the sea.’

The Blunts stayed for several days with the Roala, breaking
camp and marching southward with them. Then they left for
Damascus, spending their last night in the desert on April 15th.

1878 IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY 85

After debate they decided that Mohammed the Tudmuri
was worthy of becoming Blunt’s third Bedouin brother. Upon
being offered a choice of that honour or money, Mohammed
most satisfactorily chose the former and added to the oath a
phrase new to the Blunts, l Lel akhir min yomi' (‘to the last of
my days’). He seemed duly impressed by the ceremony and
promised to go the following winter with the Blunts to J6f, the
headquarters of his own people, the Beni Laam, from among
whom they were to help him in the choice of a wife — a third
wife as he already had two — a girl of noble blood, and worthy
to marry a descendant of the Prophet Taleb such as Moham-
med-Ibn-Aruk. The camels, the white donkey and Tamarisk,
the mare that Lady Anne had ridden throughout the journey,
but not loved, were sold. Sherifa and Blunt’s mare, Hagar,
that he had bought in Aleppo, of the Kehilan-Ajuz or old
thoroughbred strain, the fastest, stoutest, most English-looking
of all the Arab mares they had seen, Skene was to send later to
England.

The farewells over, they left Damascus for Beyrout where
they encountered the first rude shock of European society. As
they were sitting on a divan at the end of the hotel dining-
room, drinking their coffee £ in all the solemnity of Oriental
repose, a sudden noise of voices and loud laughter resounded
through the house, and presently the door burst open, and a
tumultuous throng of men and women clad in trousers and
coats, or in scanty skirts and jackets, according to their sex,
but all with heads uncovered, and looking strangely naked,
rushed across the floor. There may have been a dozen of them
in all. Their faces were flushed and excited, as if they had
been drinking wine; and they passed in front of us without
pause or salute to the upper end of the room, and there, with
no further ceremony, flung themselves each into his chair.
The dresses, voices, gestures and attitudes of these men and
women struck us as not only the most grotesque, but the most
indecorous we had ever seen.’ Worst of all, these were not
Cook’s tourists, but ‘English milords of distinction’ who had

86 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1878

arrived in their yacht from Malta. The Blunts were horrified.

Trivial as the incident seems, it doubtless brought to a head
Blunt’s admiration of all things Arabian in contrast to things
Western. In their desert travels he had found a way of life
completely suited to his pleasure. Whether it was to Lady
Anne’s it may possibly be questioned. The hardships and
illnesses which she bore uncomplainingly on these travels
would have daunted a woman less determined and perfectly
devoted. For her it seems to have sufficed that Blunt had been
happy as he had never been happy before, care free and able
to admire or censure with no sense of responsibility. He had
been looked up to and obeyed. He had even made a few firm
friends. For that short time he had been king in the most
idyllic sense. Small wonder then that the ways of the desert
seemed socially more admirable than other ways, the trammels
of life less irritating among the great tribes where the govern-
ment satisfied the needs of the people as no other government
satisfied those of any other people they had seen. It was
patriarchal, traditional and within those austere limitations,
free. The nominal suzerainty of Turkey, a corrupting in-
fluence, was its only drawback. And even that blemish was
absent in the ideal government which they discovered in their
Eastern travels of the following year.

Meantime they returned to England to hang the brace of
pistols, given them by Blunt’s brother Meshur, over the
chimney piece of the hall, to place the stone head from
Palmyra, given them by his brother Mohammed the Tudmuri,
among the relics of past journeys, and to start the Arabian
stud of which the half-dozen mares shipped to them by Skene
formed the nucleus. This stud, founded with so comparatively
little eclat in 1878 was presently to create a stir in sporting
circles as well as in English society; it became one of the most
important studs of the West, and was an absorbing interest to
both Blunt and Lady Anne for the rest of their lives.

1878

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

87

5

The Blunts had gone to Arabia for their own pleasure.
Only when ‘they saw that fortune had put them in the way of
acquiring really valuable knowledge’ did they decide to make
their experience public. Using her diaries as a basis, Lady
Anne with Blunt’s aid wrote a spirited account of the journey,
illustrated it with her own sketches and an extremely useful
map, and dedicated it to the illustrious old Indian Nawab who
had helped them to escape from Bagdad. It was the first
published attempt to give a comprehensive view of desert life
— not oasis or village life — and desert politics. No earlier
traveller, moreover, had visited the independent Shammar in
Mesopotamia or the Anazeh in the Hamad, although the other
tribes encountered by the Blunts had been inspected before;
and the fact that the journey had been made from no motive
except enjoyment gave its history a special grace. Blunt himself
edited and published the work in two volumes entitled Bedouin
Tribes of the Euphrates, adding the final five chapters of the
second book which contained the information they had
gathered about the geography and physical features of Northern
Arabia, the history and the physical, religious and political
characteristics of the Bedouins, together with all the facts
obtainable about the Arabian horse and its breeding. He also
wrote the preface and a postscript concerning the future of the
country through which they had travelled, dealing mainly with
the proposed railway along the Euphrates from Aleppo to
Bagdad, and the partial success and the failings of the Turkish
government. In reality, as Blunt said, the two volumes were
‘a joint work, in which my first political views in regard to
Arabian liberty may be traced by those who care to seek them’.

His mind full of what he had seen, he aired his views of
Arabia with enthusiasm. Lord Salisbury had just accepted the
Ministry for Foreign Affairs and, hearing echoes of Blunt’s
talk, asked Philip Currie to bring his cousin to see him. The

88 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1878

interview gave Blunt an opportunity to win over headquarters
to his way of thinking. Salisbury was not cordial to his pro-
posal that Syria and Egypt might join together against the
misgovernment of their common suzerain Turkey: ‘There
could be no political connection,’ he said, ‘between the two
provinces of the Ottoman Empire and . . . the case of each
stood on a separate basis.’ Nothing daunted, Blunt continued
to expound his ideas as frankly and fully as possible. And with
his arguments against the Euphrates valley railway scheme,
a new danger to Arabian liberty, he had better success. In fact
they weighed so heavily with Lord Salisbury ‘that he shortly
refused all Foreign Office support to the enterprise’ — such, at
least, is Blunt’s own account of his influence. Whether or not
it was really he who convinced the minister, who knows? In
any case Lord Salisbury impressed Blunt by his personal
integrity and, though their views never coincided, they were
always friendly. The meeting had been a happy one for Blunt
and filled him with hope.

Unfortunately the hope was ill-founded for events were
taking place that formed, as Blunt wrote, ‘a curious history
truly, and deserving to be especially noted as marking the
point of departure for England of a new policy of spoliation
and treacherous dealing in the Levant foreign to traditional
ways’.

In May 1878, a secret convention was negotiated by Sir
Henry Layard, British Ambassador at Constantinople, signed
by Disraeli and Lord Salisbury and by the youthful Sultan
Abdul Hamid. In accordance with this convention Turkey
leased the Island of Cyprus to England and England guaran-
teed the integrity of Asiatic Turkey in return for Turkey’s
promise to institute reforms there under the supervision of
special English Consuls. England wished to establish an
informal protectorate over Asiatic Turkey in order to check
the advance of Russia in Asia to the Mediterranean. As for
the Sultan, with the Russian army at the doors he had no choice
but to accept the English alliance. He trusted, moreover, both

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

89

1878

Sir Henry Layard and England. ‘The honour of England was
so great,’ wrote Blunt later, ‘in all Turkish eyes, and her policy
toward the Moslem Empire had been so sympathetic that no
suspicion existed anywhere of her having selfish plans.’

A month afterwards, on June 13th, the general European
congress of 1878 was called together at Berlin. It had been
summoned chiefly at British demand in order to revise the
Treaty of San Stefano which Great Britain felt had given too
much power to Russia. The unofficial disclosure at this
Congress of the secret Cyprus Convention resulted in England’s
granting France’s right to occupy a province of the Ottoman
Empire, namely Tunis, at the first convenient opportunity if
she would consent to England’s occupation of Cyprus; in
England’s agreeing that France should act jointly with her in
the financial arrangements then being made in Egypt; and in
England’s recognizing the French claim to protect Latin
Christians in Syria. The Cyprus intrigue — that ‘insane
covenant’ as Gladstone called it when he learned of it — was
responsible, Blunt held, for half the crimes against Oriental
and North African liberty witnessed by his generation.

The whole import of the government’s 1878 policy was not
of course immediately recognizable. But the Blunts found
Cyprus a dusty wilderness when they landed there on their
way to Arabia the following autumn and learned that to the
professional mind of its first governor, Sir Garnet Wolseley,
the island had little merit. And when they arrived in Syria they
heard it spoken of among the Mohammedans as backshish
taken by England for her services to Turkey. Blunt’s pride as
an Englishman was sensitive and such remarks cut deep. To
them partly his feeling against the imperial policy owes its
violence.

Before stopping at Cyprus the boat had called at Alexandria
leaving Sir Rivers Wilson there as Finance Minister. He gave
Blunt information that confirmed his interest in Egypt and
served also as a standard of comparison with what he was to
see in Arabia and later in India.

9 °

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1878

At Damascus, when the Blunts finally reached it, they had
to collect the equipment for their journey into Central Arabia
to visit Mohammed Ibn Rashid, Emir of Nejd, at Hall. Nothing
could be left to chance since they would travel for three
months over a thousand miles of desert ‘where it was impossible
to count upon fresh supplies even of the commonest neces-
saries of life’. They supplied themselves with enough food,
added to the beef-tea and vegetable soup squares they had
brought from England, to carry them comfortably to the first
largish village, four hundred miles away. They bought riding
and pack animals; and Blunt fitted himself out with complete
Bedouin costume.

Since all this took time, they bought and settled in a small
house in the Shariah Musj id-el- Kassab at the north-eastern
end of the town on the road to Palmyra. Twenty-six years
later Blunt returned and found it * a funny little place . . . but
nice inside with an inclosure of about an acre walled round
and planted with lucerne, and a fine old stone wall, shutting
us in from surrounding gardens’. On one side was the great
garden, ‘ Bostan-el-Basha’, belonging to a chief of the Damascus
Ulema, and on the other the garden of that amazing English-
woman, Jane Digby, Lady Ellenborough, and her Arabian
husband, ‘a very well bred and agreeable man’, Mijuel el
Mesrab.

As they had met the Mesrab tribe on their travels of the
year before and had become acquainted both with one of
Mijuel’s sons and with his elder brother, the sheykh of the
tribe, they were warmly welcomed by both Mijuel and his
wife. Blunt greatly admired Lady Ellenborough for her
benevolence to her husband’s tribe in whose behalf she toiled
and lavished her wealth. Her view of the Arabs in general
was Blunt’s view. She could, and did, give him much informa-
tion fortifying his own impressions.

They found a number of other people too in Damascus to
interest them. The Algerian patriot, the Seyyid Abd-el-
Kader, whose simplicity of character and sound good sense

IN THE EUPHRATES VALLEY

1878

9i

charmed Blunt, was living out a much-honoured and dignified
old age at Salahiyeh; the ex-leader of the Turkish Constitu-
tional party, Midhat Pasha, whose ‘improvements’ they had
seen at Bagdad, was there; and Sir Edward Malet. Sir
Edward Malet was then Secretary of the Embassy at Con-
stantinople. Blunt had served with him twice in the diplo-
matic service under ‘his excellent father’ and, though never
particularly sympathetic with him, had been most intimate
with his whole family. ‘The duty of a diplomatist,’ Blunt
wrote, ‘except in very rare cases, is in no way different from
that of a solicitor’, and Malet, a man of fair ordinary abilities,
was constituted to play the role admirably. He had industry,
caution and good sense, but lacked imagination and initiative.
That he should have been given some years later in Egypt a
position of responsibility requiring prompt decision and
strong action was almost as inexplicable to Blunt as the
Egyptians crediting him c with an ambitious and intriguing
restlessness’.

Though they were not congenial at Damascus, the distrust
that was to grow up between them had not yet appeared and
Blunt asked Sir Edward to accompany him and Lady Anne
on their journey into Central Arabia. Sir Edward naturally
refused the Blunts’ ‘more romantic plan’ and stuck to his own
of travelling on the ‘common tourist road’.

CHAPTER V

PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD
x

In accordance with their plans of the previous summer the
Blunts left Damascus for Nejd with Blunt’s ‘brother’ Moham-
med Ibn Aruk the Tudmuri, Hanna again as cook, Hanna’s
‘brother’, two camel drivers, and full equipment including
four deluls for riding and four big baggage camels. Nejd had
long assumed for them ‘ the romantic colouring of a holy land’
— not least because they then believed it ‘the original home
and birth-place of the Arabian horse’. The story of this
adventurous journey is told in A Pilgrimage to Nejd , nominally
written by Lady Anne but again in reality a joint production. 1

As the pilgrimage included a search after two families of
relations of Mohammed Ibn Aruk of whom nothing had been
heard for nearly a hundred years, plans were necessarily
vague. ‘To Mohammed and the Arabs with whom we
travelled,’ Blunt wrote in the Preface to Lady Anne’s account,
‘as well as to most of those we met upon our journey, his family
history formed a perpetual romance, and the Kasid or ballad
of Ibn Aruk came in on every occasion, seasonable and
unseasonable, as a chorus to all that happened. But for it, I
doubt whether the journey could ever have been accom-
plished'.’ They were received as friends, members of the Ibn
Aruk family, everywhere, and passed on from kinsman to
kinsman.

Leaving Damascus on December 13 th, 1878, they travelled
from village skeykh to village sheykh, until, nine days later,
they left civilization with a guide to take them over the black
stones of the Harra to the robber-infested Wady Sirhan which

92

1878-1879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 93

Blunt had it at heart to explore as no European before them,
he thought, had done. Just before they arrived at Kaf on the
edge of the wady, as Lady Anne leaned over to arrange some-
thing on the saddle, her fidgety delitt bolted and pitched her
off, spraining her knee. The pain was ‘indescribable’ and
made her lame for some time though she continued the march
mounted on her mare.

Not long after this accident Blunt and Lady Anne, letting
the rest of the caravan go ahead, dismounted for a rest and
tied their mares to a bush. Suddenly they heard the thud of
galloping. Blunt jumped up crying, ‘ Get on your mare. This
is a ghazd'. But Lady Anne’s sprained knee gave way, and,
as she struggled to her feet a troop of horsemen charged down
upon them at full gallop. They knocked her down with a
spear and all set upon Blunt. His gun and sword were ahead
on his del id and he had only Lady Anne’s gun, unloaded.
This they snatched and brought down on his head three times,
with such force that the stock broke. Seeing that resistance
was useless, Lady Anne shouted to the nearest horseman
’■Ana dahilak [I am under your protection]’ and Blunt threw
himself off his mare which was promptly seized by the enemy
along with Lady Anne’s.

As soon as they recovered breath the raiders asked who
they were and where they came from. ‘ English, and we have
come from Damascus,’ they replied, ‘and our camels are close
by. Come with us and you shall hear about it.’ Unexpectedly
the horsemen agreed and walked on with their captives to
where Mohammed and the servants had entrenched them-
selves behind the kneeling camels. More questions and all
was well. The raiders were of the tribe of Sheykh Ibn Shaalan
who, as the Blunts’ host of the year before, was obliged with
all his men to protect them. The mares and gun were returned
and everyone sat down on the sand to eat dates and pass
around the pipe of peace.

When the Bedouins had gone the Blunts examined their
hurts. Blunt’s were only bruises. The stock of the gun, steel

94 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

and all, was broken but his head had been saved by the rope
he wore round it, and his thick clothes had protected him
from the lances. As for Lady Anne, she was so angry at her
sprain’s preventing them from galloping up with the camels
to receive the enemy in proper fashion that she almost forgot
the pain of it. ‘I was asked if I was not frightened,’ she
wrote, ‘but in fact there was at first no time, and afterwards
rage swallowed up every other feeling. Wilfrid says, but I
do not believe him, that he felt frightened, and was very near
running away and leaving me, but on reflection, stayed. The
affair seems more alarming now that it is over, which is per-
haps natural.’

Leaving the Wady Sirhan they crossed the Hamad to J6f,
a disappointing small town which had been conquered and was
held by Ibn Rashid through his governor, a coal-black and
capricious negro despot. There they found Mohammed’s
relations — now, through the tie of brotherhood, their relations
— whom they had been seeking, and negotiations were at once
entered into for a wife. Lady Anne was sent to the harem to
look over possibilities. She reported a younger daughter,
good tempered, intelligent and pretty, with ‘great dark eyes
like a fawn’ and * a particularly open honest look’. Mohammed
on hearing the description directly lost both his heart and his
head, going about boasting of his forthcoming marriage.
The dower fee demanded rose accordingly. A council of all
the relations presided over by Blunt was called in the Blunts’
tent and after considerable wrangling it was arranged that the
girl should be bestowed upon Mohammed for the sum of £5°.
Blunt paid the dower as he had always intended to do though
he had not said so, wishing Mohammed to strike his own
bargain.

Three days passed before all difficulties were quite settled
— and then only because of Blunt’s firmness. The marriage
contract was signed and the evening spent in jubilation, a
kid was killed and eaten, songs were sung and stories told.
Meantime the Blunts set about conciliating the governor of

1879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 95

J 6 f, in order to obtain his permission to pursue their journey
to Hail. They found him a tall, very fat, very vain black man
dressed to receive them in his best and brightest silks including
sky-blue trousers. His heart was ultimately softened by a
judicious present of clothes and money and he consented to
send a guide with them through the Nefud. They were
summoned to a farewell feast with him, carpets were spread
on the roof and in the broiling sun amidst myriads of flies a
breakfast of boiled meat and rice was served. They retired
from the audience with no regret.

On the Blunts’ departure, the Ibn Aruks belied their noble
lineage. Corrupted by town life they begged for presents as
no true Bedouin would have done. However, they had been
so kind that Blunt exchanged promises of mutual good will,
solemnly kissing ‘his relations’ all round, and set forth with
high heart on the next and most dangerous part of the journey
over the Nefud, the wide desert of sand-dunes in central
Arabia.

2

There were two ways of crossing the Nefud, the easier one
a march of thirteen days, and a more difficult one of ten days.
‘For the sake of seeing the Nefud at its worst,’ the Blunts
chose the ten-day route. ‘The Nefud,’ Lady Anne explained,
‘has been the object of our dreams all through this journey,
as the ne -plus ultra of desert in the world. We hear wonderful
accounts of it here, and of the people who have been lost in it.
This ten days’ journey represents something like two hundred
miles, and there are only two wells on the way, one on the
second, and another on the eighth day.’ Providing them-
selves with eight skins of water for mares and men, dates,
bread and a kid, they started on January 12th for the great
desert.

Like a stormy sea it stretched out east and west to the

96 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

horizon in great billows the colour of rhubarb and magnesia.
In the spring when the red sands were covered with fresh
green grass the Bedouins pastured their flocks there, for at that
time of year their camels were in milk and they had no need
of water. But in January only occasional raiding parties
were to be met with. No heavily laden caravan such as
Blunt’s, if he was to believe their guide, had ever crossed the
Nefud at that point and should the camels break down they
would be helpless. On the eve of leaving the first well Blunt
warned his men of the hundred miles of deep sand they must
cross before coming to the second well, and the necessity of
husbanding strength for the effort. He appointed one of the
camel drivers ‘sheykh of the water’, with orders to dole it out
in rations every night and allow nobody to drink during the
day.

For the first miles the desert was covered with camel tracks
with here and there the track of a horse; then all trace of
domestic creatures ceased. According to the guide they were
following the road of Abu Zeyd, but to them it seemed as
if they were merely ‘ wandering about in zig-zags in a southerly
direction, sometimes toiling up steep slopes, at others making
3 long circuit to avoid a julj [ a deep pit] and sometimes
meandering for no reason — always on a perfectly untrodden
surface of yielding sand.’ A thunderstorm on the first evening
packed down the sand so that the camels could progress fairly
easily and the horses gallop. The Blunts were able to course
a rabbit or two with their greyhound. Presently they came
to the peaks of Aalem, two conical rocks jutting out of the
sand, well-known landmarks. Climbing up they saw the
crimson desert stretching away on every side. ‘What a place
to be buried in,’ said Blunt, ‘Mount Nebo must have been
like this.’ To his delight he found a painted butterfly clinging
to the rock. It must have flown four hundred miles from
Hebron since there was no nearer vegetation suited to cater-
pillars. They saw, too, many sorts of small birds and reptiles.

Two days from the second well the sands dried out, the

! 879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 97

camels flagged, and the men were obliged to walk. They took
it cheerfully, even singing and playing pranks to test their
strength. Then the water ran short. All the Mohammedans
of the party began to say their prayers zealously. The sand
seemed to become deeper and deeper. January 19th was a
terrible day. Two of the camels could carry no load. One
could not even carry his saddle. Had it not been for the
extraordinary strength of Hatheran, the gigantic camel which
led the procession and on whom most of the extra loads were
piled, a great part of their outfit would have had to be aban-
doned. The men struggled along, uncomplaining though
now grown silent. ‘Even old Hanna, with stray locks of
grey hair handing from under his kefiye/i, for he had grown
grey on the journey, and his feet bare, since it was impossible
to walk in shoes, trudged on as valiantly as the most robust
of the party.’ Only the Blunts themselves were morose,
disgusted that they lacked the strength of the Arabs and
were obliged to ride much of the time. The caravan crept
along at little over a mile an hour. They had all but given up
hope of pulling through. Suddenly, near sunset, Jobba came
into view, the oasis towards which they were struggling and
which, but for the hardening of the sands in the first day’s
thunderstorm, they never would have reached.

Jobba seemed to them the most beautiful village in the
world, its battlemented walls and brilliant green gardens set
in a strip of yellow sand backed by the towering rocks of the
Nefud, purple sandstone veined with yellow and with an
upper facing of black. From the cliffs above could be seen
the faint blue, oddly fantastic outline of Jebel Shammar, the
hills of Nejd. Towards them they floundered in leisurely
fashion after a rest at Jobba, the men singing and joking as
they went, and making the nights merry with feasting and
games around great bonfires in the starlight. There was no
hurry now that they had passed the second well. Three days
later they quitted the red sands of the Nefud and were in the
hills where ‘the very air would exhilarate even a condemned-

98 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

man’ and the ground was crisp and firm and they could
indulge their tired mares in a fantasia.

Blunt declared that he would die happy now even if they
had their heads cut off at Hall. He was fond of saying that all
places in the world are exactly alike. But Jebel Shammar
struck him as unlike every other place except possibly Mount
Sinai, and it was more beautiful than that. At Hail they were
to hear vague rumours of a Christian stranger having been
there just before their arrival but paid little attention and did
not learn of Charles Montagu Doughty’s wanderings until
nine years later . 2 ‘No European nor Christian of any sort had
penetrated as such before us to Jebel Shammar,’ Lady Anne
wrote, ‘and all we knew of the people and country was the
recollection of Mr. Palgrave’s account of his visit there in
disguise sixteen years before.’

The people of Jobba, an inquisitive ill-mannered lot, had
seemed none too friendly: their unpleasant allusions to the
Christian religion — the only taunts encountered by the Blunts
in Arabia — made the travellers fearful of what was in store for
them at Hail among Wahhabis, the puritans of Islam. Their
guide told them grisly details of Mohammed Ibn Rashid’s
seizure of power by the murder of his relations. They felt as
though they were ‘going toward a wild beast’s den’.

3

When the guide, whom Blunt had sent ahead with letters
to Ibn Rashid, returned they were somewhat reassured. The
Emir had read the letters, would be delighted to see them and
had ordered two houses to be got ready for them to occupy.
As the travellers, used now to villages that were mere cluttered
groups of mud hovels in the shade of a few tattered palms,
rode through the gates of Hail the town made an impression
of spick and span neatness, almost like a stage set. At the
Emir’s palace they were met by the chamberlain, so dignified

1879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 99

and finely costumed, that they took him to be Ibn Rashid
himself, and by a host of retainers who welcomed them and
gave them coffee. They thought they had never seen so many
agreeable faces collected together as here in the fierce Emir’s
palace in Central Arabia.

Surrounded by a number of attendants, the Emir entered,
tall, lean and gorgeously dressed, a commanding figure. He
smiled graciously as he exchanged salutations with Blunt,
Lady Anne and Mohammed Ibn Aruk but his strange, tense
face recalled uncomfortably portraits of Richard the Third:
‘sallow cheeks, much sunken, thin lips, with an expression of
pain, except when smiling, a thin black beard, well defined
black knitted eyebrows, and remarkable eyes — eyes deep sunk
and piercing, like the eyes of a hawk, but ever turning rest-
lessly from one of our faces to the other, and then to those
beside him. It was the very type of a conscience-stricken face,
or of one which fears an assassin. His hands, too, were long
and claw-like, and never quiet for an instant incessantly
playing, while he talked, with his beads, or with the hem of
his abba.'

Very soon he took them to see his gardens, his kitchens and,
what interested them most of all, what, indeed, they had
come to see, his stud. It was made up of a collection bought
from different desert tribes, as there was no special Nejd breed,
and was kept in four communicating open yards. Unprotected,
except for heavy rugs fastened across their chests, the animals
stood tethered by the feet each to a square manger of sun-dried
brick. These, the most famous horses in Arabia, presented in
January the frowsy appearance of unkempt ponies. The Blunts
were grievously disappointed. The horses seemed less good,
if anything, than many of those they had seen in the north
the year before. On further inspection, however, with oppor-
tunity to examine the points of each horse, they appreciated
the collection at its worth. The Emir’s horses deserved their
epithet of ‘little lions ’. 3

With Nejd politics and personages they soon became well

TOO

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1879

acquainted. Every morning Blunt went to the Emir’s mejlis ,
or court of justice, and then paid visits to Hamud, the Emir’s
cousin who had supported Ibn Rashid in his murderous rise
to power, or to Mubarek, the Emir’s chief slave, or others of
the palace entourage with whom he made friends. Lady Anne
fulfilled the destiny that awaited her at every Bedouin camp
and town of visiting the harem. She sat for long hours with
the Emir’s ladies, of whom the dominating figure was
Amusheh, his chief wife, a woman of some distinction and
cleverness, so magnificently robed as to present ‘an appearance
of splendid shapelessness’. With Hamud’s amiable first wife
and browbeaten second-class wife, she drank tea and ate
sweet limes.

In general they were prudent, refraining from wandering
about without escort from the Emir, for though they experi-
enced only politeness from the people of Hai'l they suspected
that very little was needed to arouse Wahhabi fanaticism . 4
Their policy was wise: some of the people were anything but
pleased, they learned afterwards, at the amiable welcome given
them by the Emir. In the Emir’s palace or under escort of
his officers they were quite safe. No objection even was made
to Blunt’s smoking his pipe whenever he chose though to the
strict Wahhabi tobacco is anathema.

Cordial relations were in full swing when suddenly a cold-
ness appeared in everyone’s manner. Presents of game from
the Emir ceased; the lamb with which they had hitherto been
regaled at dinner was replaced by camel meat; instead of two
soldiers coming to escort them to the palace, a slave boy
appeared with a message; on the fifth day they were not invited
to Ibn Rashid’s evening party; and on the sixth, Blunt, calling
at the palace, was curtly told that the Emir was not at home.
Not only did the Emir leave off paying them the customary
attentions but Mohammed Ibn Aruk, ‘usually so cheerful
and so open-hearted, had become moody and embarrassed,
keeping almost entirely with the servants’; the other servants
seemed unwilling to do their duty; and the faithful Hanna

IOX

1879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD

began to hint darkly that things were not well. The Blunts
were alarmed. Blunt sought an explanation from the chamber-
lain and other court functionaries. Things, he discovered,
were come to a pretty pass. Mohammed Ibn Aruk had
boasted that the Blunts were persons of small account and in
his care, whereas he himself was important. It did not take
long for Blunt to prick that bubble. Friendly relations were
resumed — but the affair had given them a most unpleasant
turn.

To mark the renewal of cordiality Ibn Rashid invited them
to join his retinue on a visit to the Persian Haj, the pilgrims
who on their return from Mecca had encamped outside the
town, ‘spread over the plain like locusts’. It was one of those
mornings, Lady Anne wrote, one finds only in Nejd, in the
very centre of the desert four hundred miles from the sea and
nearly four thousand feet above sea level. The air was so
exhilarating that it made them want to shout. The sky was
intensely blue and the plain sloped smoothly upwards towards
hills carved out of sapphire. Behind them were the battle-
mented walls of Hall, with the palace rising from palms almost
black in the sunlight; and before, lay the camp — parti-coloured
tents, blue, green, red, white, and the pilgrims themselves
‘a dark crowd, watching with curious half-frightened eyes the
barbaric display of which we formed a part’.

Sedately, beside Ibn Rashid, they rode out into the plain
surrounded by his followers shouting, curvetting, galloping
off and then doubling and returning to the Emir, staging a
sham fight that to the travellers had all the appearance of a
real one. At last the Emir himself could resist the excitement
no longer. He galloped off among his men, shouting and
brandishing his spear with the best of them. The Blunts were
left to contemplate with delight this marvellous exhibition of
the speed and agility of Ibn Rashid’s mares. They had come
to Nejd in the express hope of just such an exhibition.

As they watched they found themselves alone with ‘a
strange little personage:’ ‘mounted on a sorry little Kadish,

102

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1879

and dressed in the fashion of European children of fifty years
ago, with a high-waisted coat, well pleated at the skirt, trousers
up to his knees, and feet shod with slippers, a little brown skull
cap on his head, and a round shaven face, sat what seemed to
be an overgrown boy, but what in reality was a chief person
from among the Persian pilgrims’. It was Ali Koli Khan,
son of the great Sheykh of the Bactiari, in whose honour as
well as in the Blunts’ the Emir had arranged this state visit
to the Haj.

The friendship they at once struck up with Ali Koli and
a very natural desire to get away from the uneasy life at Ha'll,
determined the Blunts to march with the Haj when it departed
a few days later. With Ibn Rashid their parting was cordiality
itself: Blunt offered to be his Vakil in Europe in case he
required assistance of any kind; and Ibn Rashid, to show his
faith in them, sent them on their last day at Hail to see the
fortress of Agde, never before shown to any stranger. He
invited them, moreover, to stay on at Hail and to accompany
him on a great ghazu on which he planned shortly to ride out.
Thinking it the part of wisdom to leave while terms were so
happy, the Blunts persisted in following their plan of travelling
with the Haj towards Bagdad.

4

On February xst they left Hail marching in the vanguard
of the Haj. The procession stretched away like ants across
the plain, three miles or more in length. First walked or
almost ran, the dervishes, followed by a group of respectably
dressed people who walked out of piety. Then came the
banner of Ibn Rashid, protector of the Haj, borne in the
centre of a group of magnificently caparisoned dromedaries
moving at a fast walk. Last followed the crowd of pilgrims
with their four thousand or so camels. They were mounted
sometimes two on one camel, sometimes with a couple of boxes

r 879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 103

on each side containing the household furniture. The better
class of pilgrims and all the women except the very poor, rode
in panniers, ‘covered over like a tradesman’s van with blue
or red canvass’, or in litters fitted up with considerable ele-
gance. One old fellow kept a man to march in front of the camel
with his nargileh which, sitting in the pannier above, he smoked
through a very long tube.

The pilgrims lacked that ‘sense of propriety which is so
characteristic of Arabs’, and were far from agreeable either
in person or in habits. Some, being fanatical Shias, were
definitely hostile to the Blunts’ Mohammedan servants who
were Sunnis. But most of them were friendly enough and might
have been interesting if the Blunts could have spoken their
language or they could have spoken Arabic.

Already wearied when they left Ha'il by their long march
from Mecca and short of food, the pilgrims were in sore
straits before half the distance to Mershid, the first town, was
accomplished. The deep white sand wore down the underfed
camels — the way was strewn with dead camels — and was so
fine that sandstorms were frequent. In a particularly violent
storm the day before reaching Mershid, Ali Koli Khan was
reported lost. Up to that time the Blunts had seen something
of him but, though they learned at Mershid that he was still
alive and pursuing his journey, they never met him again.

They were slightly better off than the pilgrims. Though,
like them they lived chiefly on the locusts with which the
country swarmed, they had laid in provisions at Hai'l and were
able to vary their diet, with the help of their greyhound and
hawk, by hares and gazelles and bustards — even, once, by a
hyena. Their beasts, however, suffered. Almost on the edge
of the artificial lake on which Mershid stands, and well within
sight of the long line of its fine old walls and the burnished
gold dome of its mosque, the youngest and ugliest of Blunt’s
camels lay down, too weak to walk further. ‘ I shall not easily
forget his face,’ said Lady Anne, ‘looking wistfully after his
companions as they disappeared over the crest of the hill. He is

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

104

1879

the first of our small party that has fallen out of the ranks, and
we are depressed with the feeling that he may not be the
last.’

They arrived at Mershid nearly at the end of all their
resources of money, strength and patience. Indeed Blunt
looked so out of elbows that a tribesman of Faris, Blunt’s
brother of the previous year, who happened to be in the town
and recognized him, pressed upon him the ^xo which he had
lent Faris. Needless to say, Blunt, though gratified, refused.
Their weariness, combined with the fact that Mershid was
another hotbed of religious fanaticism, its shrine of Ali as
sacred to the Shias as the Casba at Mecca, hastened the Blunts
on their way with no more delay than was necessary to refit
their caravan. Passing through the holy city of Kerbela,
they reached Bagdad and the Residency on March 6th —
the first Europeans to have travelled from Hail to Bagdad
along the Persian pilgrim route. 3 To sleep in beds after the
past three months was luxury.

5

Amongst the letters awaiting them at Bagdad they found
an invitation from Lord and Lady Lytton to spend the summer,
or part of it, at Simla. It was an opportunity never again
likely to occur, of going to India by land and visiting the
Bactiari mountains and their acquaintance, Ali Koli Khan.
Unfortunately he had not turned up since the sandstorm;
but they remembered his talk of his father’s wonderful stud
of Arabians and his proposal that they should travel with
him to visit it.

Lady Anne questioned the wisdom of attempting such a
journey but Blunt’s ‘thirst for exploration was not yet slaked’.
Spring was just beginning, he argued, and nothing in the
world could be more delightful than spring in Persia. If the
weather became too hot, he said with what seemed afterwards

r 879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 105

an ironic optimism, they could get down at any moment to
some port on the Persian Gulf.

The deciding factor was the arrival of Captain Cameron,
the African traveller, who had just finished the first stages of a
survey for an Indo-Mediterranean railway from Tripoli
through Bushire to the Indus. Blunt offered to help him in
the remaining more serious part of the task. They agreed to
take different routes from Bagdad and meet again at Bushire
or Bender Abbas: Captain Cameron was to follow the left
bank of the Tigris as far as Amara and then to strike across
the marshy plains to Ahwas and Bender Dilam, while the
Blunts were to keep farther East, skirting the Hamrin and
Bactiari hills, through Luristan, a district of Persia still spoken
of by travellers with awe because of its dangers.

In an evil day, without due consideration of the difficulties
and dangers to be encountered, the plan was settled. Prepara-
tions were made with as little reflection as the decision itself.
It was dangerous to begin such a journey with new servants,
and Mohammed Ibn Aruk, Hanna, Ibrahim and the camel-
men, all their old servants, had left them on their arrival at
Bagdad. Colonel Nixon, as he had done the year before,
provided them with a cavass, Hajji Mohammed, who, though
far from being youthfully agile or quick witted, turned out
to be their mainstay. As interpreter he was particularly useful
since the Blunts could speak no Persian. But the cook that
they hired had to be sent away soon after the start; the camel-
men were so poor that, when the Blunts met them several
marches down the river, where they had been sent ahead, one
camel was missing and the others were unfit to travel.

The start on March 20th had other cheerless aspects. Rain
came down in sheets and the land ‘seemed a mere slough’.
Wild boars infested the countryside which the miserable
inhabitants of the district begged Blunt to kill. In two and a
half hours he got five boars and a sow. Triumphant, he went
out again the following day, taking Lady Anne on her mare
and a crowd of natives with him. They gave chase to a great

io6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

red fellow. Twice he was hit but just as the people on foot
rushed on to dispatch him he charged. Blunt turned his
mare, firing as he turned, but not quickly enough. The beast
tossed mare and rider into the air. Blunt was unhurt. But the
mare’s leg was ripped up in a ghastly wound from hock to
stifle. Blunt and Lady Anne tore off their kefyehs to staunch
the blood. Tenderly as they cared for her, she could hardly
walk. They had to leave her, ‘the noblest and best and
gentlest creature that ever was’, promising a handsome reward
if she were pulled through and sent back to Bagdad in safety.

Having no guide they were obliged to adopt their old
policy of being passed on from sheykh to sheykh. On leaving
the neighbourhood of the Tigris their camel men deserted
and, with only old Hajji Mohammed to serve them they fell
into the hands of a poor, treacherous tribe of Beni Laam who,
had they not been arrant cowards, would have taken the
travellers’ lives as well as money. The chief’s brother, a man
with a face like a thundercloud, a hideous squint, the smile of a
wild beast and the manner of a cat — soft, cowardly, and very
offensive — was detailed to guide them through the no-man’s-
land between Turkey and Persia. His right-hand man, a
villainous one-eyed rascal, and forty extraordinary looking
vagabonds, were to be the escort. They were driving camels
and oxen with empty sacks to Dizful ‘to buy corn’. Clearly
they were robbers. Being Shias they made life wretched for
the Suni Hajji Mohammed and with shouts and importunate
questionings almost drove the Blunts mad. After dark the
danger was great. On the first night Hajji Mohammed crept
near enough the Arab’s camp-fire to overhear their talk: a
debate on whether and when and how the Blunts were to be
murdered. Later the headman crept up and lifted their tent
flap. ‘Who goes there’, cried Lady Anne who was on the
lookout for trouble. The man disappeared.

Absolutely in the hands of the robbers, Blunt took the
wisest course open of putting on a great show of good humour
and boldness. He rode out into a river and drove the camels

X 879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 107

who were being carried down-stream by the swift current to
the other shore; he laughed at the Arabs’ fear of attack by
Persians; he outfaced the treachery of the Arab chiefs. Lady
Anne bravely followed his lead. Their cool superiority intim-
idated the rabble but it was a nerve-racking march. The
beauty of the country alone kept up their spirits — ‘a garden
of Eden’ to look upon, plains of grass and flowers knee-deep
intersected by rivers and swamps, the Haurin hills behind and
the snowy Bactiari mountains before.

At last they reached the camp of an impoverished and exiled
Shahzade or member of the Persian royal family and placed
themselves under his protection. Delighted to talk with
respectable people again he showed them every courtesy,
though not as the Bedouins of Arabia would have done, for
the sake of hospitality. They were obliged to pay him a round
sum for everything they received as was the case with all the
Persians whom they ran across. He gave them an escort to
Kerim Khan, the second most powerful chief of Luristan,
whose tribe occupied most of the district formerly known as
Susiana. In turn Kerim Khan sent them on to Dizful, a
small town on the great river Diz at the foot of the mountains,
and thence, through cornfields and fine plains of brilliant green
turf sprinkled over with anemones and borage flowers, to the
encampment of Husseyn, Ali Koli Khan’s father.

In Persia, unlike Arabia, a person was usually judged
entirely by his outward dress and his retinue; although the
Blunts had no retinue and were dressed in shabby Bedouin
clothes, and, moreover, were without letters to him or intro-
duction from his son, Khan Husseyn received them cordially
and conversed with them for two hours. He was the greatest
chieftain of all western Persia and very imposing, reminding
Lady Anne of pictures of Genghis Khan. As he was on his
way to Teheran he was unable to show them his stud, which
he kept in the mountains — a disappointment so sore as to
make them feel the journey ill worth its hardship.

He sent them on to Shustar where, while the authorities

108 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

delayed them, they were put up in the deserted palace and gar-
den of the absent Prince governor of the district, a fairyland
which they could hardly enjoy. The heat had become terrific.
Flies and mosquitoes swarmed in clouds. Blunt fell suddenly
ill. As soon as the governor’s understudy would permit they
left, but progressed only a few miles before being obliged to
camp. Blunt had become alarmingly worse; he could not sit
up, and was unconscious most of the night.

Slightly better in the morning, though still unable to move,
he decreed that they should travel by night, he on his delul.
By short night stages they approached the village of Ram
Hormuz until when ten miles away, with a prodigious effort
of will, Blunt mounted his mare and with Lady Anne galloped
ahead into the town. Through one of those miracles that
occurred not infrequently in Blunt’s life, the swift ride cured
him. It was probably during that gallop that Lady Anne saw
the vision which caused her conversion to Roman Catholicism.

At Ram Hormuz they were more pleasantly received than
anywhere else in Persia and felt they might have made friends
there if only they had been able to speak the language. The
chief government official walked out to their camp in the cool
of sunrise with a rose in his hand to pay his compliments.
The camp, outside the walls of the village, at the foot of
snow-covered mountains, was a lovely place in a field of green
wheat on the bank of a small winding stream. Near by stood
the little tomb of some saint in gardens half run wild of palm-
trees and blossoming roses and pomegranates. Nightingales
sang in the thickets. But Ram Hormuz was like a furnace.
And always there was the plague of flies and mosquitoes.
They were weary of travel and doing all their own drudgery.
Blunt was reduced almost to a skeleton.

The rest of the journey was little better than a feverish
dream of heat and flies. Still proceeding by night marches
they at last reached Dilam on the Persian gulf, proud of having
done what few Europeans had ever done before: come all the
way by land from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

1 879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 109

They had travelled over two thousand miles. And in the last
ill-advised Persian march had, themselves, driven their camels
without accident five hundred miles over mountains said to be
impassable for camels, and ‘through swamps and streams
never before traversed by camels, and across nine large rivers,
one of them bigger than the Rhine.’

On April 28th, dog-tired, reduced to little more than skin
and bone, they entered Bushire. ‘When we arrived at the
door of the Residency,’ Lady Anne wrote, ‘the well-dressed
sepoys in their smart European uniforms, barred us the door
with their muskets. They refused to believe that such vaga-
bonds, blackened with the sun, and grimed with long sleeping
on the ground, were English gentlefolk or honest people of
any sort.’

‘When I think of it now with my better knowledge of
Arabia,’ Blunt said forty years later of the journey to Nejd
and Persia, ‘and of the wild people who carry on there the life
of the primitive world unchanged from the time of the Princes
who brought gifts to Solomon, and with so little knowledge
and experience to guide us, I am filled with wonder at our
foolhardiness in attempting it and still more at our success in
carrying it out so easily.’

6

The Blunts’ journeys to Nejd and Iraq as well as their
previous summer’s travels added considerably to European
knowledge of Arabia. They brought back new information
about the Arabian horse. More important, they made valuable
contributions to geographical science in A Pilgrimage to
Nejd which cannot be disregarded, 8 as Hogarth has pointed
out, ‘even where such close observers of Arab life as Palgrave,
Guarmani, and Doughty have recorded their experiences, or
explorers have passed as well equipped as Wallin, Huber and
Euting.’ 7 They were not scientifically inclined, and carried

no

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1879

no instruments, except compass and barometer, but they were
undisguised and free to take notes and their observation was
so accurate that they helped to solve, for instance, the much
debated question of the origin of falj pits, or fuljes , in the
Nefud. But what most distinguished them from other travel-
lers, Hogarth also noted, was their ‘romantic curiosity and
imaginative sympathy with Bedouin society’. They under-
stood the unique quality of the Shammar society of Nejd in
contrast with the society of the rest of Arabia, the close
relations and community of interest between its nomad and its
town-settled members.

In Nejd the Blunts had found the supreme example of a
country quite independent, with a government suitable and
wholly satisfactory to its people, who though poor were
contented. ‘The political constitution of Jebel Shammar,’
wrote Lady Anne, ‘is exceedingly curious; not only is it unlike
anything we are accustomed to in Europe, but it is probably
unique, even in Asia. It would seem, in fact, to represent some
ancient form of government indigenous to the country, and
to have sprung naturally from the physical necessities of the
land, and the character of its inhabitants. I look upon Ibn
Rashid’s government as in all likelihood identical with that of
the kings of Arabia, who came to visit Solomon, and of the
shepherd kings, who at a still earlier date, held Egypt and
Babylonia; and I have little doubt that it owes its success to
the fact of its being thus in harmony with Arab ideas and
Arab tradition.’

Except for one flaw — the uncertainty of succession to the
Sheykhat or Bedouin throne — the system seemed to the Blunts
perfect. In Nejd, as nowhere in Europe, were to be found in
actual existence liberty, equality and brotherhood. No taxes,
no police, no conscription, no compulsion of any kind fettered
and irritated the inhabitants, since their ruler depended on the
citizens’ good will: his army was made up of citizen soldiery.
In short, as Blunt later wrote, this view ‘of the ancient system
of free government existing for so many centuries in the heart

Ill

1879 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD

of that wonderful peninsula, was to confirm me in the
enthusiastic love and admiration I already entertained for
the Arabian race’. It became to Blunt a symbol of what
subject races and nations should work toward. He deter-
mined to do what he could to help the Arabian Bedouins to
preserve ‘their precious gift of independence’.

The admirable aspects of the state of Nejd were un-
doubtedly enhanced in Blunt’s mind by their sharp contrast
with the state of the Arabs of Iraq, the Beni Laam whom he
had found ‘demoralized, impoverished, and brutalized by
Ottoman rule!’ At the time he fulminated against Ottoman
rule, because it was corrupt and corrupting, not against the
rule of all foreign powers whoever they might be: that logical
conclusion of his thought he had not as yet reached, for in
speaking of those corrupted Arabians of Iraq, he said, ‘in
England’s protection, if it could be given’, lay ‘a possible
road for them to salvation’. This prediction Blunt would
hardly have indulged in a few years later when his anti-
imperialism was at its height. It is true that Iraq under
English protection has been strengthened and set on her
feet, and now is an honoured nation, but, Blunt would later
have asked, is it any the better for that?

With the contrast between his ideal and the actual cor-
ruption of Iraq fresh in his mind, his first visit to India under
British rule had a greater effect upon the formation of his
views than might otherwise have been the case. He questioned
sharply the paternal value of the English Government and
made observations in 1879 at Simla that aided in shaping his
‘ideas on larger questions of Imperial policy, giving them the
direction they afterwards took’.

7

Taking boat from Bushire to Karachi in response to Lord
Lytton’s invitation the Blunts arrived at Peterhof, the Vice-

1 12 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

regal lodge at Simla, on May 16th, 1879. Lord Lytton had
been for two years India’s Viceroy and was just bringing his
first Afghan campaign to a close. Superstitious by tempera-
ment, though a rationalist in religion, he spent his spare
time in launching fire-balloons and auguring from their
quick or slow ascension good or bad fortune for his army.
The results were not allowed to decide his action but they
soothed his high-strung nerves. Luckily he connected Blunt’s
coming to Simla with ‘the good turn the war had taken’
and looked upon him as long as he stayed as a fortunate
influence.

Though Lytton and Blunt were necessarily at opposite
political poles and though their temperamental romanticism
took the form in Lytton of sentimentality and in Blunt of
realism, they remained devoted and intimate friends. At
Peterhof, therefore, Lytton made Blunt ‘the confidant of all
his thoughts’. Personally he was not only interested in
Blunt’s view of Arabia but sympathized with it; as a govern-
ment official he could not, and did not wish to, go with Blunt
beyond a definite point. But he did instruct his Foreign
Secretary, Sir Alfred Lyall, and his Finance Minister, Sir John
Strachey, to talk Arabian and Indian matters over with Blunt
and to give him all possible information.

Ideas of Arab independence were agreeable to the official
view because the Sultan of Turkey had begun to alarm India
by pan-Islamic propaganda and had asserted a claim of
sovereignty over the Persian Gulf ports which for many years
past had been under a kind of protectorate exercised by the
Indian Navy. Lyall, therefore, reported well of Blunt’s Arabian
views and it was half agreed that Blunt should return the fol-
lowing winter to Nejd bearing a complimentary message from
the Viceroy to the Emir Ibn Rashid. Blunt rejoiced in the
promise of such a mission for he was still a believer, though
with failing faith, in the sincerity of British Imperial pro-
tection. Many years later, however, in 1907, he wrote: ‘I am
glad now, with my better knowledge of the Indian Government,

i 8 7 9 PILGRIMAGE TO NEJD 113

that the proposal led to no practical results.’ It might have
subjugated instead of freeing the Arabians.

At Simla he had already begun to distrust the consequences,
however good the intentions might be, of English rule, but
he thought that the rule ‘could be improved and that the
people at home would insist upon its being improved if they
only knew’ — and by ‘the people at home’ he meant the
government in England. In a characteristic letter, less super-
ficial than its liveliness makes it appear, to Harry Brand, later
Lord Hampden, radical member of Parliament, he wrote that
though a good conservative and member of the Carlton Club,
he was shocked at the Egyptian bondage in which the Indian
natives were held. It had given his faith in British institutions
and the blessings of British rule a severe blow, and he had
come to the conclusion that if England went on developing the
country the inhabitants sooner or later would have to resort to
cannibalism, for there would be nothing left for them to eat
but each other. ‘I do not clearly understand,’ he continued,
‘why we English take their money from these starving Hindoos
to make railroads for them which they don’t want and turnpike
roads and jails and lunatic asylums and memorial buildings to
Sir Bartle Frere, and why we insist upon their feeding out of
their wretched handfuls of rice immense armies of policemen
and magistrates and engineers.’ He could not see, he said, the
moral obligation which governments acknowledge of taxing
people for debts they and not the people have incurred. In
fact, all public debts even in a self-governing country seemed
to him more or less dishonest and in a foreign despotism like
India a mere swindle.

In another letter he expressed himself even more strongly:

‘ I believe the natives capable of governing themselves far better
than we can do it, and at about a tenth part of the expense.’ All
these views he begged Brand to believe were his own, not
those of the officials upon whose information they were based.

It is odd enough that such unorthodox opinions should have
sprung from purely official information. While in India Blunt

H

1 14 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879

‘had no opportunity of conversing with so much as a single
representative of its thoughts in opposition to the official
views’. Not until he returned from India four years later,
under Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty, did he approach the problem
of India’s government with less one-sided knowledge. Need-
less to say, what he learned then from the natives and from
personal observation of their life, strengthened his former
opinions. The first journey to India schooled him somewhat
in the ways and the point of view of foreign government and
contributed largely to the crystallization of his views on
England’s methods in Egypt.

CHAPTER VI

ISLAM

i

The winter of 1879-80 in England was, Blunt afterwards
noted, in certain ways the busiest of his life. His manifold gifts
tempted him to remain in everything an amateur. Neither
early training nor personal ambition led him to concentrate in
any one discipline or field of endeavour. Moreover, the self-
confidence that his brilliant abilities bred in him was accom-
panied by a constitutional shyness: on the one hand sensitively
proud, often arrogant, and always unwilling to compromise,
he was on the other, dependent to an unusual degree for his
happiness on recognition. His self-dramatization harks back
to this and a craving for the admiration and affection easily
excited by his personal charm, especially from women with
whom all his life long he was involved in love affairs. In public
life he was a nonconformist, leaving the well-beaten tracks to
assert himself by pulling strings, or executing some brilliant
coup as a free-lance rather than assuming the responsibility of
leadership.

Until his fortieth year he had taken no part in politics; he
had never made a speech in public; never written an article
for a review; never so much as sent a letter to a newspaper — an
astonishing record in view of his later life. Now he began to
talk and write and ‘even overcame his timidity to the extent of
appearing once or twice upon a public platform’. The years
of travel in Arabia and India had given him confidence as well
as the sense of ‘a mission in the Oriental world, however vague
and ill-defined’. To his old literary and social preoccupations
were now added political interests. Invited to take part as a

n 5

n6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1879-1880

distinguished traveller, together with M. Serpa Pinto, M. de
Brazza, and Captain Cameron, in a meeting of the British
Association in August 1879, made his first public speech.
Captain Cameron advocated a Euphrates railway; Blunt
opposed the scheme. Captain Cameron had intended to
explore one route from Bagdad to Bushire while the Blunts
explored another. But he had turned back whereas the Blunts
had succeeded in accomplishing their journey and knew its
dangers. 1 The meeting was a triumph for Blunt and seemed
to him to be an auspicious beginning. He followed it up in the
Fortnightly Review by an article against the proposed railway
that interested the editor, John Morley, in his Eastern ideas.

For the moment, however, he had too many irons in the fire
to get on methodically with his Eastern propaganda. Not only
was he writing poetry and arranging and editing the manuscript
of A Pilgrimage to Nejd , but he was greatly pre-occupied with
establishing his Arab stud at Crabbet, and was in constant
correspondence about it with sportsmen, including the Jockey
Club. In September, 1880, he published in the Nineteenth
Century an article in which he argued the possibility of increas-
ing the size of the Arab horse — a notion that he came later to
consider mistaken.

The article coincided with the first of a series of annual
visits to Newmarket where he was entertained at ‘Warren
House’ by Prince Bathyani, familiarly known to the racing
world as ‘Old Bat’. Though Blunt enjoyed these visits and
learnt something about breeding horses, he was not enough of
a racing man to find life at Newmarket altogether congenial.
The racing struck him as monotonous; cards, the inevitable
evening amusement, he did not play; and he was no gambler.
In fact he felt like a ‘Turk at a christening’.

At Warren House he met most of the racing celebrities of
the day, Lords Bradford and Falmouth, Sir John Hawkins, the
Duke of St. Albans, Mr. Ten Brock, the American- — all
members of the Jockey Club where Blunt’s project of breeding
Arabs had been taken up by Lord Calthorpe. They announced

ISLAM

i 879-1 880

117

a special Arab race to be run under their auspices at New-
market in four years’ time and directed Weatherby to include
Blunt’s Arab importations under the head ‘Arabians’ as
thoroughbreds in his stud lists. So Blunt became, as he said,
an object of curiosity and the Crabbet stud of real interest,
especially among the older men who still honoured the
eighteenth-century tradition of Arabian importations. The
subject was a good deal discussed in the Press and many visits
were paid to Crabbet by breeders of thoroughbreds.

It was the Arab stud and his views on horseflesh, not his
politics, that first brought him into ‘ epistolary communication’
with Gladstone, whose pursuit of all things Greek made him
curious to learn Blunt’s theories about the horses of antiquity,
and especially about the breeding of those of Greece and Troy.
Through Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century , Gladstone
asked for a memorandum on the genealogy of the horse. The
ensuing correspondence, plus the fact that Edward Hamilton.
Blunt’s intimate friend, was appointed in 1880 to be one 01
Gladstone’s secretaries, were the first links of Blunt’s future
communication with Gladstone. 2

Blunt’s interest in Eastern affairs led him to spend much time
in London where he had established a pied-a-terre three years
earlier at 1 o, James Street, Buckingham Gate. Now most of his
social engagements began to have a political aspect. He break-
fasted with Sir Rivers Wilson and discussed Egypt with General
Gordon, ‘a very wonderful man’. He called on his mother’s
old friend, Cardinal Manning, who asked how he was voting.
Blunt said that he was not voting : ‘ I can get up no interest in
these things. I look upon European civilization as doomed to
perish, and all politics as an expedient which cannot materially
delay or hasten the end’. The Cardinal agreed.

In March, Blunt paid a visit to old Lord Stratford de Red-
cliffe at Frant, on the borders of Sussex and Kent, where at the
age of ninety-four he was living in retirement. He gave Blunt
a paper advocating certain reforms for Turkey that he thought
of sending to The Times. It was an old man’s work, rambling,

1 1 8 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1880

vague, lacking in vigour; Blunt afterwards remarked with some
asperity that ‘old men should write nothing but their recol-
lections’. Nevertheless it helped him to formulate his own
ideas for Asiatic Turkey. And he was enthralled by Lord
Stratford’s ‘old-world confessions’ and reminiscences of Byron,
on his Childe Harold journey, with whom Lord Stratford when
charge d’affaires at Constantinople had ridden daily for six
weeks and found ‘nothing at that time scabreux in his con-
versation’.

The general election came, fought largely on questions of
Eastern policy. Blunt could support thoroughly neither party.
With Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign and his violent attack
on Disraeli’s policy of imperial expansion, Blunt entirely
sympathized, though, even at that time he believed neither in
Gladstone’s sincerity, nor in the Liberal Party’s backing him
in foreign politics. They had no Eastern policy of their own
and would fall between the two stools of a reversal of the Tory
policy and a logical continuance of it. Having tried to reform
Turkey and found it impossible they would probably lose their
tempers and drift into war. On the other hand Lord Salisbury’s
policy, he felt, courted disaster for it would ‘bring Germany
down to Constantinople’ — one of Blunt’s well-founded pre-
dictions.

But in domestic policy he bemoaned wholeheartedly the
overwhelmingly Liberal victory. As a country squire of Con-
servative traditions, he feared the Liberals would be strong
enough to make ‘all sorts of experiments’ and ‘play havoc with
our British constitution’. The game laws and the land laws
would go: ‘and all the -palladiums ,’ he wrote, ‘will be dis-
mantled.’ The change in government, moreover, was upset-
ting to Blunt personally, for Lytton would resign with the
ministry and his Indian visit of the following winter be
prevented.

His fear that nothing would be done to better the late
Government’s Eastern policy was increased by the fact that
Gladstone as Premier surrounded himself with ‘ineptitudes’.

1880 ISLAM 119

The most deplorable appointment was that of Lord Granville
to the Foreign Office. ‘An amiable old nobleman with a good
knowledge of French,’ Granville was very deaf, very idle, and
his diplomacy ‘of the old procrastinating school’. He was
fond of saying that he believed * in dawdling matters out’. Only
in sending Lord Ripon to India as Viceroy did Blunt see any
indication of a sincere attempt to carry out in office what
Gladstone had preached in opposition.

‘ Eddy’ Hamilton kept assuring Blunt that ‘ Mr. Gladstone’s
sympathies with Oriental liberty were no whit abated’, and at
this time appeared to feel considerable sympathy with Blunt’s

views. He took him to a certain Mrs. L , one of Gladstone’s

‘Egerias’ who lived ‘in a big house in M — Square’ for the
purpose of indoctrinating her, and so influencing Gladstone,
with the proper Arabian ideas. The visit, politically speaking,
was no great success: ‘she read us with much spirit a drama she
has been writing about Herod, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar —
sad stuff, which she assured us Gladstone admired exceedingly’.

As a bid for Gladstone’s serious attention Blunt wrote in
the early summer four letters to the Spectator , the first that he
had ever written to a newspaper. In July he contributed to the
Fortnightly Review an article entitled ‘The Sultan’s Heirs in
Asia’, in which he proposed that since a large portion of
European Turkey had been divided up into independent states,
so Asiatic Turkey might be divided according to the prevailing
nationalities. And he appealed to Gladstone to confirm his
words by using the Cyprus Convention for the good of Eastern
peoples.

An invitation to Blunt to a party in Downing Street followed
immediately. He had already met Gladstone and had not been
impressed. He continued to be unimpressed. Arriving early,
he gained twenty minutes’ conversation with the Great Man
in which he detailed his ideas about the regeneration of the
East. Gladstone ‘seemed to take an interest, as far as a man
can who is totally ignorant of the A.B.C. of a question’. But
he considered ‘everything critical ' . His remarks struck Blunt

120

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1880

‘as the reverse of profound’; and his questions ‘contrasted
unfavourably’ with Lord Salisbury’s of three years before. It
seemed to Blunt that he had made up his mind about nothing,
and would drift on till a smash came. Blunt found some satis-
faction, nevertheless, in feeling that he had succeeded 1 in graft-
ing him with two ideas, one that the Caliphate was not neces-
sarily vested in the House of Othman, the other that Midhat
Pasha was a fool’.

His belief that his opinion ‘was of some account with
Gladstone in regard to Eastern affairs’, however, may well be
questioned. To say the least the constant advice and offers of
aid from Blunt, a man free from political entanglements and
responsibility, must have been somewhat irritating to one so
profoundly enmeshed in them as Gladstone — if indeed the
advice and offers always penetrated through the sagacious
Hamilton to the Grand Old Man himself.

2

Blunt’s genuine interest in the East had made him a marked
man and given him an importance welcome to his vanity. Per-
haps unconsciously he ‘played up’. In any case his ideas
concerning the East were given a new direction by a meeting
with Malkum Khan, the Persian Ambassador. This took place
one June afternoon when Blunt called upon ‘A’ and found
Lord Queensberry as usual expounding his religious doctrines
— ‘mere Comtism’, they seemed to Blunt. Finding it difficult
to array them extempore in orderly fashion, Queensberry took
refuge in reciting a poem he had written on them in blank
verse. The poem was in full swing when Philip Currie entered
with the Persian Ambassador. Malkum Khan, ‘a little old man
with a long nose and very black eyes’, when the poem was
finished offered to tell them in his excellent French the story
of a religion founded some years before in Persia and of which
he had been at one time the head: ‘ “It will exemplify the

i 8 8o

ISLAM

121

manner in which religions are produced,” he said, “and you
will see that the doctrine of humanity is one at least as con-
genial to Asia as to Europe. Europe, indeed, is incapable of
inventing a real religion, one which shall take possession of the
souls of men; as incapable as Asia is of inventing a system of
politics. The mind of Asia is speculative, of Europe practical
. . . . When I was a young man ... I founded a religion. . . .
I went to Europe and studied there the religious, social and
political systems of the West ... . I knew that it was useless
to attempt a remodelling of Persia in European forms, and I
was determined to clothe my material reformation in a garb
which my people would understand, the garb of religion. I,
therefore, on my return, called together the chief persons of
Teheran, my friends, and spoke to them in private of the need
which Islam had of purer doctrine. I appealed to their moral
dignity and pride of birth .... They all found my reasoning
good, and in a short time I had got together 30,000 followers.
Under the name of a Reformation of Islam I thus introduced
what material reforms I could. To my doctrine is due the
telegraph, the reorganization of the administrative depart-
ments, and many another improvement since gone to ruin. I
had, however, no intention at the outset of founding a religion.
The character of saint and prophet was forced on me by my
followers. They gave me the title of “Holy Ghost”, and the
Shah that of “Reformer of Islam”. I wrote a book, a bible of
my creed, and enthusiasts maintained that I worked miracles.
At last the Shah was alarmed at my power, which in truth had
become superior to his own. He sought, in spite of our old
friendship, to kill me, and my followers sought to kill him.
For two months we both lived in great fear of assassination,
and then we came to an explanation. I loved and revered the
Shah, and I asked permission to travel .... I wrote to the
Shah, who replied, offering me any appointment I would, so
I would remain abroad; and I accepted the position of Ambas-
sador-General to all the courts of Europe.” ’

So exotic a tale fired Blunt’s imagination — he was, after all,

122 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1880

a poet — and apparently, with his usual bent toward self-
dramatization, he saw himself the saviour of Islam as Malkum
Khan had been of Persia. Characteristically he at once took
practical steps to follow a similar course. He had already
learned to respect Islam, but he had neither comprehended it
nor even discussed it with anyone learned in its law or its
modern thought. He now determined to study at least the
main features of Mohammedan doctrine as they affected
Mohammedan politics, to go to Jeddah about the time of the
pilgrimage; perhaps to penetrate Arabia again, go through the
Hejaz or Yemen to Nejd, for among the Wahhabis he might
learn the Arabian as opposed to the Ottoman view of Islam.
With a Wahhabi teacher he might devise a movement of
reform, working out himself the political elements; the Wah-
habi, the religious elements.

It was, as Blunt himself acknowledges, ‘a sufficiently wild
idea’ but he took it seriously for the time being . 3 He put
himself into the hands of a certain Sabunji who was carrying
on in London an Arabic monthly called El Nakleh (The Bee),
which preached religious reform to Mohammedans on the
most advanced lines of modern thought. Sabunji was well-
fitted to cope with a Christian beginning an intensive study of
Islam as he was of Christian origins, a member of ‘one of the
Catholic sects of Syria’, and had been a priest before becoming
a Mohammedan. Although not able wholly to trust him Blunt
used him for what he was worth, first as his teacher in Moham-
medan thought, afterward as secretary and finally, at the time
of the Nationalist uprising in Egypt, as his emissary.

From him or from the Ambassador, Malkum Khan, Blunt
first learned to understand both the historical and the modern
aspects of the Caliphate question. Being opposed to Ottoman
rule, what he learnt struck him as of high importance, in view
of the kind of reform he was beginning to look for, and he
immediately sent a memorandum on the subject to Gladstone.
Hamilton’s reply, he thought showed that members of the
Cabinet and Downing Street in general, considered the idea

i 8 8 o

ISLAM

123

important. This encouragement inspired Blunt with the
notion of going to Arabia and heading a movement for the
restoration of the Arabian Caliphate. ‘People have been called
great,’ he wrote, ‘who have sacrificed themselves for smaller
objects, but in this I feel the satisfaction of knowing it to be a
really worthy cause.’

Definite measures must be taken. Blunt interviewed Sir
Charles Dilke at the Foreign Office, the Under Secretary for
Foreign Affairs. He seemed to Blunt at the moment — though
he was later to change his mind — a * superior man’, particularly
as Dilke’s questions were plain and to the point, and once he
understood he took action. To Blunt’s surprise, Dilke appeared
to encourage his wish to go to Nejd in the autumn and even
wrote the draft of a despatch to Goschen at Constantinople to
forward the scheme.

The plan, however, was destined, as Blunt had expected, to
fall through: on July 17th came news of the defeat of Burrows
by the Afghans at Kandahar and, with it, the realization that
the final blow had been dealt to Lytton and the policy of
adventure beyond the Indian frontier. All the world was
depressed. The Imperial fortunes of England had never
seemed so low. Even Blunt, little of a Jingo as he had become,
was cast down. It meant to him, moreover, the death of his
cherished wish to return to Nejd entrusted with a mission, for
Lytton would be recalled to England.

3

August 5th found the Blunts lodged at a pot-house, ‘The
Star and Garter’ in Portsmouth, awaiting the Lyttons’ return.
From the windows could be seen the Victory and in the window
over the way was a bust of Nelson. These relics of England’s
greatness touched him — ‘and Heaven knows,’ he wrote, ‘I am
no Chauvin’ — but they increased his sense of the decay of her
fortunes in the past sixty years. And the daily newspapers
brought him to the verge of despair. They were * full of dastardly

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1880-1881

124

congratulations at the discovery that not 2,000 but only 1,000
men were lost on the Helmund, and at General Burrows not
having positively run away; of fears lest England should
embark single handed on a war with Turkey, and an abject
hope that France may think fit to see us through our difficulties
in the East’.

The Lyttons’ arrival was a delight. They were too happy
at being again in England to be depressed by politics — ‘Oh,
the dear drunken people in the streets!’ exclaimed Lady Lytton
as she came ashore, ‘how I love them’. Blunt envied them their
pleasure in England and the prospect of returning to Kneb-
worth; and he envied Lytton both his consciousness that he
had done his best and had done well, and his carelessness of
public success.

Little as Blunt approved of Lytton’s policy it seemed to him,
in view of the Government’s imperialistic demands to have
been necessary; its execution, bold and successful. At this
time he held no one man or party responsible for England’s
decay. But he found the Government, whichever party was
in, ‘a mob, not a body endowed with sense and supported by
the sense of the nation’. It was no longer honest or just, and
no longer made up of gentlemen. England’s position in the
world, he told Lytton, had been gained only by ‘immense
industry, immense sense, and immense honour’. These gone,
‘we find our natural level’. ‘For a hundred years we did good
in the world; for a hundred we shall have done evil, and then
the world will hear of us no more.’

Other matters than politics, however, claimed the attention
of the two poets for the moment. Both were charming and fine
looking and much sought after; and both had need of full
private as well as public lives. They were gay dogs together.
Far from being rivals, they encouraged each other in affairs of
the heart. Blunt’s love affairs at this and other times were
doubtless known to his own circle and were not regarded as sur-
prising. After a narrow escape from the charge of co-respondent
in a well-known divorce case in 1876 he conducted them with

1880-1881 ISLAM 125

extreme discretion. Their history will perhaps be told when
his own diaries are published in full. Meantime their existence
must be reckoned with not only in personal concerns but as
an incalculable influence on his public career.

Lytton persuaded him to make a new volume of poems by
re-arranging his already published sonnets and adding to them
the best of the sonnets omitted from the earlier book or written
since 18 75. The ivory-coloured volume. The Love Sonnets of
Proteus , was published at the end of the summer of 1881 with
a dedication to Lytton, and with a satiric frontispiece drawn
by Blunt: an engraving of a man with top-hat pulled over his
eyes and coat collar turned up against the driving rain, stand-
ing with his back to a newly made grave on whose headstone
is inscribed Hie jacet Amor Aeternus. The Sonnets are divided
into four books: ‘Manon,’ poems written from 1865—77
giving the story of his passion for Skittles; ‘Juliet,’ poems that
describe a less idealized, maturer love, written chiefly in 1875
and 1876; ‘Gods and False Gods,’ poems to other loves and
poems of reflection on Time and Death; and finally, ‘Vita
Nova,’ in which the world opens out before the poet and he
writes of impersonal things — art, strange lands, falling empires.
The sonnets are his farewell to youth, the account of the loves
and sufferings of his first forty years. In them he lays bare
what was once his heart, acknowledging, in styling himself
Proteus, ‘a natural mood of change’. ‘Yet, while looking back
upon his feelings here portrayed as things now foreign to his
life, and recognizing the many errors and exaggerations of his
youth, he finds it impossible wholly to regret the past, knowing
that those only are beyond all hope of wisdom who have never
dared to be fools.’

The philosophy of the volume is that of the earlier Sonnets
and Songs more fully exemplified. Blunt is a realist who faces
the facts unflinchingly, depending on himself alone to find their
meaning. His reading of life makes it clear why his beliefs and
actions are rooted always in personal experience.

The book is less uneven than its predecessor. There are no

126

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1880-1881

imperfectly achieved experiments in allegorical and narrative
verse. The poetry is at higher tension, more passionate and
mature. The thought is subtler, as in the sonnet

There is no laughter in the natural world
Of beast or fish or bird. . . .

Who had dared foretell
That only man, by some sad mockery,

Should learn to laugh who learns that he must die?

and in the sonnet that follows it, written at the same time,
October 1876 —

But I am comforted in this, that I,

Although my face is darkened to men’s eyes
And all my life eclipsed with angry wars,

Now see things hidden ; and I seem to spy
New worlds above my heaven. Night is wise
And joy a sun which never guessed the stars.

Sometimes the sonnets reprinted from the earlier book have
been revised, and for the better. The imagery, for example, in
the three sonnets ‘to Juliet, Reminding Her of a Promise’, has
been made more exact since the occasion of the poem was now
far enough away to need no disguising:

The privet hedge

We saw cut down has sprouted green again,

And swallows have their nests above the ledge,
Where we so often sat and dared complain,

Because our joy was new, and called it pain.

has become,

The very lane

Down to the sea is green. The cactus hedge
We saw cut down has sprouted new again,

And swallows have their nests on the cliff’s edge
Where we so often sat and. . . .

Again, at the end of the third sonnet, the lines

' i ox»~C W vfc— - ,

J-L.

Tt.

' [, crest, V£ in.^ , ( tSxML ( X-o V|

^-Vt 4_t IjJ VvJ— c-|j^ 4~r'~iv.C X»-vJTj |^i>

/)“"=■ LV’- ..“Ci-otc

v.-j fuJ.A.V«tv>- •tv'-CW ,.iC ^.loU. .

xrvk. Wm: a- Ivw 7 f^-x. u J w < T- t r'£_cC fc* \>^y ( jc

J| j^, U-vwC x. wxx<-v«.av - 3^. \7 A.*-^_«.‘to •

cf {Tv-wUL. tfcwC>-T-v<| U(T , «."Con. <.*-*. j^JT t tX~ It tt^, CL. |v,>~xc. e(ja- ,

(1 &,tc(x- 'Cctl^-CL- , "ft.* .'To 'Xj^c-a.tV'-ct — *

CXwJU> M.v-O'-t' ^ V“V.S-0~«_ tHl 0«-c^| L U i^-vv^lX-^fi-. cj {.^ C wV|v. j^CLO-Sl -
£L ()L^-cr|-u 'f*> V^frv-o-x- 'f*-o-<^:2> (HA-A-vw ,» \/uvj!, z(\.aIL J-C «i- -
— * *7 Cj>-tw^LdL |o^<rpJX»C-J Y - ^tx-O-C' <d. Cv,| i-4. -0 'vx.<~xja— ,

vJ f'W-fc.vj^ lv» av^*tr |v.C.% ^^4 CT\,-*-*» X0~C_C.- 1< — CW* *K «. <Tvv-^?^~ •’>”V- ^sLa\.
W^!_4L i^v-A-x-C- ,j> lv.ow.tC u

ax^Y Jv ir-trV- C-"V -V 4 otx<vl£- U^,<*. ,

\? t<4 Ox^r^T VO-^v-wC-Cv. Ivu. ( £ Ju "f" (X. / Lc i t

Sonnets of Proteus , XXXI

Facsimile of Wilfrid Blunt’s Handwriting

i88o-i88i

ISLAM

127

I made narration in my discontent,

Of the wise secret . . .

in the second version read,

I made narration (it was middle Lent

And you with Judas flowers had filled your lap),

Of the wise secret. . . .

Apart from individual sonnets such as ‘St. Valentine’s Day’
which is like a fresh stinging wind from the Downs, the series
of fifteen sonnets, the poet’s ‘Farewell to Juliet’, is the most
interesting work in the book. They reflect Blunt’s moods, of
recrimination and grief, of irony, weariness and, in the final
parting, controlled bitterness; and they give an impression
that is unforgettable of Juliet herself, ‘her sweet melancholy
air of tender gaiety’, her ‘sad half-suppliant voice’, her gentle-
ness, her firmness. ‘Juliet’ is an individual and a Victorian;
quite unlike the more universal ‘Manon’. Among these fare-
well poems are the three dramatic sonnets, delightful in their
Manet-like picture of the lovers’ ‘first word of folly’ in the
Beaulieu woods. The first written in 1872 — the others per-
haps at the same time — runs :

Do you remember how I laughed at you

In the Beaulieu woods, and how I made my peace?

It was your thirtieth birthday, and you threw
Stones like a school-girl at the chestnut trees.

The heavens were light above us and the breeze.

Your Corydon and all the merry crew
Had wandered to a distance, busier bees
Than we, who cared not where the hazels grew.

We were alone at last. I had been teasing
You with the burden of years left behind.

You were too fair to find my wit displeasing,

And I too tender to be less than kind.

Your pebbles struck me. ‘Wretch,’ I cried. The word
Entered our hearts that instant like a sword.

128 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1880-1881

The last is the work of a painter as well as a poet:

I see you, Juliet, still, with your straw hat
Loaded with vines, and with your dear pale face,

On which those thirty years so lightly sat,

And the white outline of your muslin dress.

You wore a little fichu trimmed with lace
And crossed in front, as was the fashion then,

Bound at your waist with a broad band or sash,

All white and fresh and virginally plain.

There was a sound of shouting far away
Down in the valley, as they called to us,

And you, with hands clasped seeming still to pray
Patience of fate, stood listening to me thus
With heaving bosom. There a rose lay curled.

It was the reddest rose in all the world.

A great admirer of the Love Sonnets , Lytton wrote to Blunt:
‘If I know anything of poetry or have any true feeling for it,
they are the most genuine poetry I have read since Tennyson’s
early poems, and a few bits of Browning’s best work.’ And,
in a review for the November Nineteenth Century , 1881, he
compared them favourably with their Italian and English
predecessors, defending even the liberties taken with the sonnet
form and quarrelling only with certain images that seemed to
him too solemn or sacred for their context. Eight years later,
in the introduction to another book of sonnets, A New Pil-
grimage , Blunt himself defended his practice of stretching the
sonnet form to suit his thought and feeling, and of the use, so
prevalent in his sonnets, of assonance for rhyme. Like most
defences, this one made little difference to his critics: those
who upheld strictness of form in the sonnet continued to carp.

The passing of time has brought about a juster appreciation
of the high poetic qualities of Blunt’s Love Sonnets . Even
when first published they had ‘considerable success’, among the
fairly restricted circle to whom they became known. Blunt was
delighted — not because the success ensured his status as a poet,

i88o-i88i

ISLAM

129

but, characteristically, because ‘it gave me almost at once a
certain rank in the literary world which was not altogether
without its influence on my subsequent relations with my
political friends’. With Byronic gesture he proclaimed,

I would not, if I could, be called a poet,

. . . but would choose
On the world’s field to fight or fall or run.

4

Leaving the proofs of the new volume for Lord Lytton to
correct, Blunt went off to Egypt in November 1880, to carry
out his plan of studying the Mohammedan religion. In actual
fact he accomplished far more than that. He laid the founda-
tions for the intimacy with leaders of liberal thought and
Nationalist action in Egypt which was to take him so far. At
Cairo a young Alem connected with the Azhar, Sheykh Moham-
med Khalil, made it his duty and pleasure to teach Blunt all
he himself knew. Blunt later wrote of him, ‘of all the Moham-
medans I have known [he] was perhaps the most single-minded
and sincere, and at the same time the most enthusiastic Moslem
of the larger and pure school of thought’. He held with all
those who professed belief in the One God — Judaism and
Christianity were only corrupted forms of the true religion of
Abraham and Noah — and the progress of the world toward a
state of social perfection where a universal brotherhood would
be proclaimed. To effect this, it was necessary to bring Islamic
law into harmony with modern knowledge, a development of
which it was capable if the Koran and the Traditions were
rightly checked against one another. This the true inter-
pretation of Islam, as Mohammed Khalil considered it, was
the basis of the liberal reform movement among the Ulema of
Cairo which had been started ten years before by an Afghan,
Sheykh Jemal-ed-Din, of whom Blunt later saw much.

On January 28th, 1881, Mohammed Khalil took Blunt to

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

i 8 8 i

130

see the most remarkable of Jemal-ed-Din’s disciples, Sheykh
Mohammed Abdu, in his little house in the Azhar quarter. It
was a day, Blunt said years afterwards, ‘to be marked by me
with an especial white stone, for it began for me a friendship
which has lasted now for nearly a quarter of a century with
one of the best and wisest, and most interesting of men’. Blunt
came to know Mohammed Abdu as a religious teacher, as the
leader of a movement of social reform and as a head of a
political revolution ; he was to know him also as a prisoner, as
an exile, and under police surveillance at Cairo; and he was to
see him ‘by the strength of his intellect and his moral character,
reasserting himself as a power in his own country’.

Mohammed Abdu wore oriental dress, the white turban
and dark kaftan of Azhar Sheykhs. He was a man of about
thirty-five, of middle height, active, and with singularly
penetrating eyes and a frank, cordial manner. The chief
tenet of his creed was a new political basis for the spiritual
needs of Islam. The House of Othman for almost two
hundred years had cared nothing for religion. Abdu hoped
for the reconstruction of the Caliphate, explaining ‘how a more
legitimate exercise of its authority might be made to give new
impulse to intellectual progress’. He expressed his views in
a tone of moderation that convinced Blunt of their practical
wisdom. Opinions so enlightened seemed worth understand-
ing. To do so intelligently, however, and certainly before
acting upon them, Blunt realized that it would be necessary to
have sounder knowledge than he possessed. He set out with
Lady Anne on his intended visit to Jeddah and Nejd intent
upon learning all that they could teach him of the attitude and
thought of their Mohammedan inhabitants.

Though he fell ill at Jeddah of malarial fever and was
prevented from travelling inland by the recent appointment
of a sherif of Mecca who was both reactionary and anti-
European, he was able to gain the information that he sought.
He found that he could learn more of modern Islam at Jeddah
in a week than in a year elsewhere, for the very shopkeepers

i 8 8 i

ISLAM

I 3 I

discoursed of things divine and even the Frank Vice-Consuls
prophesied. The vigorous life, the practical hopes and fears
of nineteenth-century Islam, and above all its reality as a moral
force, astonished him. ‘I left it interested, as I had never
thought to be, in the great struggle which seemed to me
impending between the parties of reaction in Islam and reform,
and not a little hopeful as to its favourable issue.’

On their return from Jeddah to Ismailia the Blunts were met
by discouraging letters from Hamilton. He gave little hope
that the Liberals would take any steps forward in Eastern
policy beyond, perhaps, strengthening and opening up Greece.
Blunt was not in the least interested in Greece; indeed, on first
reading the letters, he was annoyed that Hamilton should have
written so much about it. But, as usual, all was grist to his
mill. Possibly, if Gladstone encouraged a rising on the Greek
frontier, he might encourage at the same time one in Western
Arabia. With renewed zeal Blunt set off to discover the
present state of affairs in Syria.

Crossing the Suez Canal to the Sinai Peninsula, he and Lady
Anne struck eastwards over a long track of sand-dunes, to a
very little known hilly region called Jebel Hellal, where they
made friends with four Bedouin tribes, including the very
Azazimeh with whom they had nearly had an encounter five
years before over the well water. 4 These tribes now besought
the Blunts to help their sheykhs who had been treacherously
captured and carried off to prison in Jerusalem by the Ottoman
Government. The Blunts were always ready to oppose the
strong in favour of the weak, even at expense to themselves,
and, no doubt, also enjoyed playing the part of benefactors.
They found the sheykhs at Jerusalem. ‘The sight of these
unhappy prisoners,’ wrote Blunt in the Nineteenth Century ,
September, 1882, ‘men of high birth and honourable life, lying
in their filth with scores of common criminals in the worst
dungeon in Syria, moved me to compassion, and I registered
a vow that I would devote a share of my energies thenceforth
to the cause of freedom for the Arab race.’

132

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

i 8 8 i

Neither at Jerusalem nor at Damascus, where the Blunts
spent much time and trouble on the affair, were they able to
effect the sheykhs’ release. As a last resort Blunt wrote to
Goschen, the British Ambassador to the Porte, begging him
to interfere and pointing out that England might need the
friendliness of the tribes south-east of Gaza if ever in time of
war she found it necessary to secure the Suez Canal. Possibly
this suggestion brought the sheykhs their long-awaited release ;
whether or not, it was remembered, as Blunt later believed, by
the British Government in a way not at all to his liking.
During the Egyptian Nationalist uprising, in the summer of
1882, an English secret agent (Edward Palmer) was sent
precisely to those tribes whom Blunt had befriended to draw
them by the use of Blunt’s name, into alliance with the British
against the Nationalists whom Blunt himself was supporting.
‘I was, therefore,’ he wrote, ‘as they say, unworthily, “hoist
with my own petard”.’

The affair of the sheykhs disposed of, Blunt’s mind reverted
to his interest in an uprising among the Arabs. Syria and all
the Arabian frontier seemed to him to be in a state of political
ferment pushing toward a pan-Islamic movement. Were
England to give her support, an Arabian Caliphate might be
established and the old Seyyid Abd-el-Kader, who had given
Blunt help at Damascus in regard to the imprisoned sheykhs,
might be made Caliph. Not unnaturally, the English Govern-
ment showed little enthusiasm for such a plan when it was
broached to them. The Blunts were constrained to deal ‘merely
about horses’ with their friends the Anazeh Bedouins, whom
they accompanied northwards to Aleppo before sailing home
to England in the early summer. 5

Their winter’s experience Blunt summed up in The Future of
Islam , written at Crabbet at the end of the summer of 1 8 8 1 . 6
In it he committed himself ‘without reserve to the Cause of
Islam as essentially the “Cause of Good” over an immense
portion of the world’, and urged England to support Islam if
only for the sake of the large proportion of Moslems in India.

i 8 8 1

ISLAM

133

The French invasion of Tunis, he thought, heralded not only
the break-up of the old temporal power of Islam, but a liberal
reformation that would bring to Islam a new spiritual as well
as a new temporal power. It would destroy the Sultan’s claim
to the Caliphate; the seat of the Caliph would be moved to
Cairo, then to Mecca, or once for all to Mecca. This change
in the Caliphal seat and the problem of protecting pilgrims to
the holy cities of Arabia were two matters of prime importance
to Mohammedans. It could hardly be doubted, Blunt wrote,
that if England refused to take an interest in them ‘some more
resolute neighbour’ would do so, for Islam, roused by Tunis’s
fate to a sense of its political and moral dangers, looked to some
strong European power for support. Abandoned by England,
Islam would become an enemy who would make the dream of
reconciling the Indian population to English rule for ever an
impossibility.

CHAPTER VII

EGYPT

i

N o sooner was The Future of Islam off Blunt’s mind than he
started again for Arabia. He had come to look upon it ‘as a
sacred land, the cradle of Eastern liberty and true religion’, little
suspecting that his chief interest in Islam was to lie henceforth
not there but in Egypt. Happening to go up to Cairo for a
few days, he became so absorbed in the Egyptian political
muddle that he remained for several months.

During his previous year’s visit he had been delighted to
find his old acquaintance, Sir Edward Malet, established at
Cairo as Consul-General and had accepted Malet’s version of
conditions unquestioningly. He had even viewed the Khedive,
whom Malet took him to see, with optimism, thinking him ‘if
not very interesting, at least holding the language of a civilized
and liberal-minded prince [who would] with proper manage-
ment ... go straight’. This rosy view of Egypt’s ruler was
quickly changed in 1 8 8 1 when Blunt came to know Sheykh
Khalil El Hajrasi of the Azhar, a man of some importance and
an intimate friend of the army as well as of the civilian leaders.
From Sheykh Khalil and through Sabunji, who accompanied
Blunt as secretary and who had ‘a real genius’ for ferreting
out the news of the moment, he soon obtained a very different
account of the events of the past summer from that given by
Malet and the other English officials and by visitors to Cairo.

The accession of Mohammed Tewfik to the Khedivial throne
in 1879, Blunt learned, had been greeted with hope by all
those who had been working in Egypt for a constitution, as
well as by the foreign governments. But Tewfik was weak and,

134

EGYPT

i 8 8 i

135

brought up by his mother in the harem where she was a mere
servant and he of small account, was well versed in all the habits
of insincerity and dissimulation which in the East, as Blunt
pointed out, are the traditional safeguards of the unprotected.
Between reformers wanting constitutional government and
consuls and comptrollers ‘forbidding him to part with any of
his power, a power they intended to exercise in his name them-
selves’, he shilly-shallied in a lamentable manner.

The point of attack in his conspiracies was the army, which
had become, and continued to be, the centre and source of
disturbance. It was rent by legitimate grievances and by
jealousy between the fellahin, most of whom were common
soldiers, and the Circassians, 1 from whom the officers were
chiefly drawn. The leader in this army class feeling was, as
early as 1877, Ahmed Bey Arabi, a Lieutenant-Colonel, but
a fellah.

To the fellahin Arabi symbolized all that was best in them-
selves. He became their champion, talked of far and wide as
‘El Wahhid’ — ‘the only one’. Gradually even the Consti-
tutionalists, many of them Circassian civilians, came to look to
Arabi as a positive force through which to obtain their ends.
They wished for a constitution under which the supreme power
should be a Turco-Circassian oligarchy; Arabi wished the
supreme power to be vested in the people. But both saw
that in order to acquire a constitution at all, they must join
forces. Gradually the two parties became one — the ‘Nationalist’
party.

By devious ways the Khedive embroiled Arabi and the other
fellah army leaders in a quarrel with the Prime Minister, and
on September 9th, i88r, Arabi, supported by the army,
marched to Abdin Palace, voiced their complaints to the
Khedive, and obtained all their demands. The next morning
the country awoke to learn that not merely a revolt but a
peaceful revolution had taken place. On September 9th,
arbitrary rule had ended.

Foreign Office reports and the English Press had led Blunt

136 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT i88r

to believe the revolution a purely military one; and he shared
‘with most lovers of liberty a distrust of professional soldiers
as the champions of any cause not that of tyranny’. Now he
had the satisfaction of finding the ideas vaguely foreshadowed
by him in The Future of Islam ‘as a dream of some few liberal
Ulema of the Azhar, already a practical reality’. A liberal
reformation of Islam had begun at Cairo. All native parties,
including the whole population of Cairo, not excepting the
Khedive, seemed united in the realization of a great national
ideal.

Drawn into sympathetic discussion of possible reforms with
his native friends, Blunt was soon called upon to enter the
political arena himself; the students of the Azhar, dissatisfied
with their leader, the Sheykh El Islam, recently installed by
the Khedive, feared that he had the suppoit of the English
officials at Cairo, and begged Blunt to use his influence with
Malet in their favour. He found Malet not only ignorant of
the whole affair but prepared to say that the religious disputes
of the Ulema were outside his province. The students, re-
assured by this news, forced the Khedive to accept another
Sheykh El Islam.

This small service on Blunt’s part gave the Nationalists
confidence in him. They asked him to delay his departure and
see them through their further difficulties. He readily con-
sented. His sympathies were genuinely aroused and, of course,
the position of intermediary between the Nationalists and the
English officials satisfied both his pride and his imagination.

He saw much of Malet during the weeks of December and
January and was able to clear up ‘many small misapprehen-
sions’ between him and the Nationalists. Though Malet was
not then unsympathetic with the Nationalists, he was singularly
ignorant. All he had to go upon was what Sherif Pasha, the
one Nationalist whom he knew personally, and the Khedive,
and his own Greek dragoman who picked up news at the cafes
of the European quarter, chose to tell him. He was, moreover,
in ‘terrible perplexity’ concerning the wishes of the English

i 8 8 r

EGYPT

137

Government. It was a relief to him to find in Blunt one who
could suggest a policy.

In accordance with a faith soon to be relinquished, Blunt
believed that Egypt could not manage herself by herself: ‘It
will be a great misfortune,’ he wrote, ‘if such protection and
supervision as the Government gets from England should be
withdrawn, at least for some years and until a new generation
has grown up used to a better order of things than the old.’
But it was clear to him that Egypt was on the right road and
that the only possible line for England to take was that of
supporting the Nationalists. He impressed upon Malet his
opinion that when Gladstone ‘came to know the facts he must
be on the Constitutional side’.

Blunt’s doings as unofficial intermediary were watched with
interest by English visitors to Cairo. The fascination which
he had exercised upon those around him in youth had grown
more apparent with his increased self-confidence. Wherever
he might be eyes were drawn to him, his movements were
watched, his words listened to — whether with sympathy or
scoffing depended largely upon his will, for, though he could
effectively exert himself to charm, he did not scruple to show
indifference or rudeness when he felt like it. Now in the winter
of 1 8 8 x he presented a picturesque and occasionally surprising
figure in his intent preoccupation with ‘native’ ways and ambi-
tions. Certain of his friends among the visitors upheld his
views, particularly Sir William and Lady Gregory.

Before this time Lady Gregory had taken little interest in
politics. Through her friendship with Blunt formed during
this winter in Egypt, a friendship that was to last for forty
years, she became a strong partisan of the Egyptian
Nationalists, and, except for Lady Anne, perhaps the firmest
ally that Blunt had during his work for them in England in
1882-83. In after years he was wont to say that he had educated
Lady Gregory in politics: as indeed he had, if only by over-
coming her self-distrust and engaging her interest in Egyptian
Nationalism. Her husband, Sir William Gregory, had done

i 3 8 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1881

remarkable work as Governor of Ceylon in building up happy
relations between the ruling and the subject peoples, and he
had before this upheld the causes of small nations. During
1 8 8 1 he supported in every way, and particularly in letters to
The Times , a view of the Egyptian situation similar to Blunt’s
own.

Lord Houghton, too, was at first sympathetic with Blunt’s
attitude. In fact by mid-December, Blunt wrote later, ‘I had
succeeded in bringing round nearly all the English element at
Cairo to my view of the case. Even Sir Auckland Colvin, the
English controller of Egyptian finance, professed himself
converted and half-inclined to come to terms with the revo-
lution’ — a conversion that was to prove short-lived.

On December 12 th Blunt met Arabi for the first time. He
was taken to the Pasha’s house by mutual friends and accom-
panied by Sabunji as interpreter. Arabi received him cordially.
In appearance he was a typical fellah, tall, heavy-limbed, some-
what slow in movement. He had little of the alertness of the
soldier, more of the deliberation of gesture and courteous
dignity of the village sheykh. In repose his features were
dull, his eyes abstracted like those of a dreamer, but when he
smiled and spoke ‘one saw the kindly and large intelligence
within’.

Arabi had already heard of Blunt as a sympathizer with the
fellah cause, and was interested in Blunt’s family connection
with Byron for, although he knew nothing of Byron’s poetry,
he honoured his work for liberty in Greece. Arabi talked
frankly about all the questions of the day. He clearly ‘did not
wholly trust’ the Khedive. Both to him and to the Dual-Govern-
ment of France and England, however, he expressed loyalty
so long as they did not interfere with national regeneration.
He made a distinction between the Ottoman Government,
from which he would brook no interference in the internal
affairs of Egypt, and the religious authority of the Sultan that
he was bound to obey. In response to Blunt’s explanations of
Gladstone’s views, he agreed that England rather than France

EGYPT

139

was to be looked to for sympathy, but he distrusted Malet — a
point upon which Blunt tried to ease his mind.

The Nationalist leaders’ attitude impressed Blunt favour-
ably. Arabi’s words ‘went to the root of things and fixed the
responsibility of good government on the shoulders which alone
could bear it’. ‘I felt,’ Blunt wrote in 1907, ‘that even in the
incredulous and trifling atmosphere of the House of Commons
words like these would be listened to — if only they could be
heard!’

With Mohammed Abdu and the other civilian leaders,
Sabunji acting as scribe, Blunt drew up a manifesto of the
Nationalist Party’s views. He sent it, with the approval of both
army and civilian leaders, under a covering letter to Gladstone,
and, on Sir William Gregory’s advice, so that it could not be
pigeon-holed and overlooked in Downing Street, to The Times
as well. Chenery, the editor of The Times , published it with a
leading article and approving comments. 2 Unfortunately he
stated that Arabi had written it, an inaccuracy enabling Malet,
who had objected from the beginning to its being sent to The
Times , to dispute its authenticity. Its reception, nevertheless,
was good, for it was moderate, frank and logical, well calculated
to win approval. That Europe any longer should misunder-
stand the situation in Egypt seemed impossible.

But at Cairo a new difficulty had arisen in which Blunt’s
aid was again requested. In view of the Khedive’s promise to
enlarge the army to the maximum allowed by the Sultan’s
firman, the Nationalist Minister of War, Mahmud Bey Sami,
demanded a large increase over the 1 8 8 1 budget of the War
Department. The financial control felt that they could not
give it; yet refusal might cause a new military demonstration.
At this impasse Colvin called upon Blunt to find out what sum
would satisfy the army and to explain that he objected not to
the army’s but to the budget’s increase. 3

Again Blunt was successful in the office of mediator: Arabi
and the officers agreed, on Blunt’s assurance that Colvin’s
word could be trusted, to withdraw their demands. They

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1881-1882

140

promised ‘to have patience and make no further armed demon-
strations’ — a promise that they kept.

Malet thanked Blunt for having helped him and Colvin out
of a considerable difficulty. But in his dispatch to the Foreign
Office — which, obtusely enough, he showed to Blunt — he
mentioned merely Blunt’s encouragement of the Nationalists
and complained of his having sent the Nationalist manifesto to
The Times. Never a word did he say of Blunt’s work on behalf
of the English officials. Not unnaturally Blunt spoke his mind.
Malet cancelled the despatch and wrote another, somewhat
repairing the injustice. The incident served, as it was bound
to do, to add to Blunt’s support of the Nationalists the spur of a
personal mistrust of the English officials at Cairo.

For some weeks, however, he continued, although ‘always
with a feeling of possible betrayal at Malet’s hands’, to give
what help he could to the Agency. 4 At first the political
horizon seemed fair: the Chamber of Delegates had been
summoned to discuss the promised Constitution; Arabi had
been made Under-Secretary of War; the British and French
Agents appeared to look favourably on the prospect of a
Parliament. All that was necessary to insure steady progress
was a declaration by the Foreign Office in frank support of the
Nationalist policy already in train. Blunt fully expected it to
be made.

Instead of such a declaration the English and French
Governments promulgated a joint note on January 6th, 1882,
in which they assured the Khedive of their support, and
encouraged him to quell any uprising against his proper
authority. 5 Blunt was shocked. The obvious meaning of the
document was that the powers would support the Khedive
against the Nationalists.

Soon after its arrival he went to Malet. Malet gave a long
explanation of how the note might be understood as favourable
to the Nationalists, and asked Blunt to persuade Arabi to accept
it as a friendly demonstration. The attempt was futile: ‘Sir
Edward Malet must really think us children who do not know

i 8 8 2

EGYPT

141

the meaning of words’, was Arabi’s reply. He went over the
note step by step, making Blunt, who had been sceptical from
the first, feel that ‘in truth Malet’s explanation was nonsense,
and I a fool before Arabi and ashamed of having made myself
the bearer of such rubbish’. But he said only that he had
delivered the message as Sir Edward had given it, adding,
‘He asks you to believe it . . . and I ask you to believe him’.

The Joint Note united the Egyptians in jealously guarding
what they considered their rights. Its promulgation coincided
with the drafting of the new organic law that was to define the
power of the Representative Chamber in the promised Parlia-
ment. The majority of the delegates thought that they, as
representatives of Egypt, should dispose of that part of the
budget which concerned internal affairs, leaving to the foreign
Financial Comptrollers, as guardians of foreign obligations, the
care of that other part which dealt with the public debt. This
seemed reasonable enough to Blunt. The Financial Comp-
trollers, however, insisted upon retaining the right that they
had exercised for the past two years of drawing up the whole
of the yearly budget. Again Malet and Colvin called upon
Blunt to patch matters up. They primed him with their
arguments and arranged for him to meet a group of the
delegates for a private discussion. He could only persuade
them to incorporate a few modifications in the law. On the
main point they were immovable. *

Nationalists on the one side, foreign agents — with the
exception of the French Minister — and English Colony on the
other, were now adamant in opposition. In the first volume
of his Secret History Blunt reported a conversation with Colvin
on the last day of January which opened his eyes to the attitude
of English officials at Cairo and caused him to warn the
Nationalists to expect armed intervention. Some time earlier
Colvin had remarked to him, in regard to the duplicity of
Orientals, that ‘an Englishman who knew the game . . . could
always beat them at their own weapons, and they were children
in deceit when it came to a contest with us’. Now he said of

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

142

the Egyptian Nationalists that ‘he had thought them amenable
to reason, but he found them quite impracticable, and he would
do his best to ruin them if ever they came into office’. Inter-
vention, he argued, was ‘necessary and inevitable’ and ‘he
would spare no pains to bring it about’. To Blunt’s expostula-
tion that such action would mean war, Colvin replied that he
‘understood it in that sense’ and that ‘war meant only annex-
ation’. He made no secret of his view that ‘England would
never give up the footing she had got in Egypt and it was
useless to talk about abstract rights and wrongs of the Egyp-
tians. These would not be considered’.

At the end of a half-hour’s hot argument, Blunt said, ‘I defy
you ... to bring about English intervention or annexation’.
In his diary he noted his fear that he had added to Colvin’s
political opposition a personal animus, that ‘it had become a
trial of strength between us’. Whether or not his fear was
justifiable as far as Colvin was concerned, it points to the
probable effect of the conversation on himself. Political and
personal antagonism always interacted in forming Blunt’s mind.

An event now took place which confirmed Blunt and the
British officials in their mutual distrust. Early in February
the Prime Minister, Sherif Pasha, and the President of the
Delegates, Sultan Pasha, who had thrown in their lot with
the Foreign Comptrollers in the quarrel over the budget,
were forced to resign. The Delegates elected a new ministry
that was entirely Nationalist, in which Mahmud Pasha Sami
was Prime Minister and Arabi Minister of War. On the face
of it the quarrel seemed to have ended in a Nationalist victory.
But in England and in Europe reports were circulated by
The Times and by Reuter’s Agency that the Deputies had
demanded Sherif’s overthrow only under threat from the
army and that Sultan Pasha had resigned only at the point of
Arabi’s sword. In foreign public opinion the Nationalists were
discredited.

The Press reports were, as far as Blunt could discover, ill-
founded. At Sultan Pasha’s request he wrote a long letter —

i 8 8 2

EGYPT

H3

never printed — to The Times contradicting the reports, and
conveyed Sultan’s emphatic denial to Malet who had repeated
the story in his dispatches and had telegraphed it to Gladstone.
Malet at first insisted on the truth of the tale, saying he had
got it from Sultan Pasha himself ; then he said that he had got
it at second hand from Sultan; and finally, pressed further,
he lost his temper and said that Blunt had no right to cross-
question him.

Blunt now had become estranged not only from Malet and
Colvin but from most of the English Colony and was living in
a camp on the desert at Heliopolis enjoying what, he said, he
had ‘always loved best, life in the open air’. The Gregorys
were among the few who continued actively to sympathize
with him. Lady Gregory described a visit to the Blunts made
during this time with Mrs. Fitzgerald and Lord Houghton —
who, though now politically disaffected from the pro-Nation-
alists, derived considerable pleasure from witticisms at their
expense and could not resist picturesque entertainment: ‘they
[the Blunts] received us in Bedouin costume at the doors of
their tent. Mr. Moore and two or three Arab sheykhs to
luncheon — first sweets, nougat, etc., then incense burned and
coffee — then a bowl of boiled lamb, and one of rice and
coloured water. W.S.B. said the chief sheykh is not what he
would call a robber, but ravages the villages near him.’

It seemed to Blunt that he could be of greater use to the
Nationalists by returning to England to act as their mouth-
piece than by remaining in Egypt. If news was to be distorted
or cut from whole cloth in the foreign Press some independent
source of information was needed to enlighten the English
Government and public opinion. Blunt still believed that the
Government would uphold the Nationalists if it could but hear
‘the truth’ — a belief that was strengthened by a letter that he
received from Gladstone towards the end of February answer-
ing his own letter sent six weeks before with the Nationalist
Manifesto. ‘I feel quite sure,’ Gladstone wrote, ‘that unless
there be a sad failure of good sense on one or both, or as I

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1882

144

should say, on all sides, we shall be able to bring the question
to a favourable issue. My own opinions about Egypt were
set forth in the Nineteenth Century a short time before we took
office’ — in an article, ‘Aggression on Egypt’, denouncing the
policy of intervention — ‘and I am not aware as yet of having
seen any reason to change them’.

When Blunt showed Arabi this letter, Arabi begged him
to tell Gladstone that he and his fellow ministers sought ‘a
friendly understanding with the English Government’. But
he complained of Malet and Colvin and asked what Blunt
thought were the chances of a conflict. Blunt, remembering
Colvin’s remarks, said that he considered the danger a real
one. He himself intended ‘to preach the cause of peace and
good will but he felt that he could not do otherwise than
advise Arabi ... to stand firmly to his ground’. The best
chance of peace was to be prepared for defence, he argued,
since the financiers, who were behind all Egypt’s difficulties,
would be loath to urge a war that might ruin their own
interests. He quoted to Arabi Byron’s lines, ‘Trust not for
freedom to the Frank’, of which Arabi highly approved: and
promised that if the worst came he would return and throw
in his lot with the Nationalists in a campaign for independence.

Egyptian bonds and property had begun to go down. As a
final gesture of confidence in the Nationalists before leaving
Egypt, Blunt bought from the Domains Commission for
£1,500 a garden of forty acres on the edge of the desert
beyond Heliopolis about ten miles from Cairo. He had
camped outside its walls the year before on the way to Syria
and wondered at its beauty with the apricot trees in full
flower. To Sheykh Obeyd, as it was called from the small
tomb of a local saint of that name within its walls, Blunt was
to return for many winters. The memoirs in which most of
his Egyptian experience was recounted were written in one of
its shady walks. Its charm lingered in his memory, making
him feel the more strongly that Egypt was his ‘second
country’.

i 8 8 2

EGYPT

T 45

2

When Blunt arrived in England on March 5th, 1882, the
Government was absorbed in its Irish difficulties. Most of the
great Whig leaders were for strong measures in Ireland and
had come to look upon ‘Nationalism’ in whatever country it
might be found as a byword and reproach. On the other
hand Gladstone, Blunt heard, far from being annoyed by his
interference in Malet’s diplomacy, was obliged to him both
for his action and for his letters. And in the public mind
his and Sir William Gregory’s letters had invested the Egyptian
Nationalists, particularly Arabi, with a halo of romance that
secured at least a hearing for further ideas about them. Blunt
found that he was able personally to command ‘considerable
attention’.

For advice as to how to make use of this good start he went
to his cousin ‘Button’ or Algernon Bourke, the younger son
of Lord Mayo who had been Viceroy of India, and nephew
to the Right Honourable Robert Bourke, afterwards Lord
Connemara, who was leader of the Tory Opposition in the
House of Commons on all questions of Foreign Politics.
Button was a ‘young man of fashion, closely connected with
the official world’, and intimate with people about the Court
and in high financial circles. He was also connected with
the Press, being ‘on the staff of The Times , not as a writer,
but as an intermediary for Chenery, the editor, with political
personages’. Largely because he saw in them possibilities of
creating a stir, he supported Blunt’s views. ‘Scrapes’ and
unorthodox political intrigues were the breath of life to
Button. Nevertheless his advice was often astute. From his
superior heights of worldly wisdom he warned his cousin not
to trust in Eddy Hamilton’s optimistic view that ‘armed
intervention with Mr. Gladstone in power was an impossi-
bility’. He advised him, whilst continuing his present friendly
relations with Downing Street, to talk to everyone he knew in

K

146 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

Parliament and to write letters to The Times in order to drum
up sympathy. If a sufficiently strong public opinion could be
aroused, enough pressure might be put upon the Government
to keep it in the way that Blunt, and Button also, felt it
should go.

Advice to take immediate action of such a personal kind
of course appealed to Blunt. He began at once to follow it by
enlisting the sympathy of George Howard and his wife, later
Earl and Countess of Carlisle. Mrs. Howard, one of the
Stanley sisters who had tried long ago to instil into Blunt
liberal opinions, was a strong Gladstonian and urged him to
trust implicitly in the Prime Minister. Her husband, less
sanguine, was inclined to agree with Button that other reliance
was necessary. He took Blunt to the Lobbies of the House
of Commons, where he was henceforth to be a frequent
visitor, and introduced him to various political personages
who promised assistance. Somewhat later, in ‘February’ of ‘the
Idler’s Calendar’, Blunt wrote : ‘Under the Speaker’s Gallery’ —

In all the comedy of human things

What is more mirthful than for those, who sit
Far from the great world’s vain imaginings,

To mingle in its war of words and wit,

A listener here, when Greek meets Greek, Fox Pitt,
At question time in the Queen’s Parliament?

’Tis the arena of old Rome.

The first rebuff to Blunt’s progress was administered by his
cousin Philip Currie, later Lord Currie, at the Foreign Office.
To Currie, full of Malet’s complaints, Blunt’s Cairo doings
seemed merely a ‘large practical joke at the expense of the
Foreign Office’. But it was difficult to withstand Blunt’s
combined energy and charm. His disapproval melted under
the fire of Blunt’s arguments and he arranged meetings for
him with Granville and Dilke for the next day.

On his way to the East in November Blunt’s earlier favour-
able opinion of Sir Charles Dilke had received a rude shock.

EGYPT

1882

147

He had met him in the London-Paris train, and learned from
him something of the manoeuvres leading to the Anglo-
French Commercial Treaty which, as one of the British
Commissioners, Dilke was negotiating with Gambetta. It had
seemed to him then that Dilke meant to persuade England to
fall in with Gambetta’s repressive Egyptian schemes in
exchange for Gambetta’s signature to the Treaty; and the
Joint Note to Egypt had marked, in Blunt’s mind, Gambetta’s
and Dilke’s success. He was not surprised, therefore, in
March to find Dilke hostile to the Nationalists, although he
was startled by the absurdity of Dilke’s chief complaint : that
the Nationalists had spent half a million sterling on the army.
Since the Nationalists had been in power only six weeks this
mistake, if not the impression its publication created, was
easily corrected.

Lord Granville’s equally ill-founded statement that ‘the
whole thing in Egypt was an intrigue to restore’ the deposed
Khedive Ismail, was harder to deal with. Blunt found Gran-
ville ‘singularly urbane’ but settled in his opinion that the
Egyptian difficulties must end in the Nationalists being put
down by force. Clearly the only way to move the Foreign
Office would be to bring pressure to bear from without. All
Blunt’s hopes for the future centred upon the Prime Minister.
‘I must see Gladstone,’ he wrote.

Up to this time, from a feeling of loyalty to men who had
been his friends, he had made no public complaint against
Malet or Colvin. But when news came on March 13th that
the French Financial Comptroller had resigned and there
seemed to be a chance that Colvin might be made to do like-
wise, Blunt felt it imperative ‘to tell Gladstone all the truth
about them’. He drafted a letter including Arabi’s messages
both of goodwill towards the English Government and of com-
plaint against the British officials, and his own suggestion that
a Commission of Inquiry be sent to Cairo to examine into the
situation in a friendly spirit, the only spirit that could possibly
avert danger. 6

148 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

The letter was followed by the much desired interview with
the Prime Minister. At 1 1.20 on March 22nd Blunt entered
the Great Man’s presence to find him looking better and
younger than two years before, and to be most kindly received.
His letter was lying on the desk before Gladstone who was
evidently eager to hear what he had to say. Blunt talked with
eloquence, encouraged by the Prime Minister’s sympathetic
manner and little needed request ‘to tell him all’. ‘I could see,’
he wrote later, ‘that every word I said interested and touched
him.’ Gladstone’s sympathy, he felt, was ‘obviously and
strongly’ with the Nationalist movement.

When Blunt had told his view of the part played by the
army in the movement and the feeling of the Nationalists
towards the Sultan and the Viceregal family, Gladstone asked
if he had said all this to Granville. Blunt replied, ‘He stopped
me at the outset by telling me that Arabi had been bought
by Ismail! What could I say?’ Just at that moment Granville
was announced. Gladstone went out with a look of annoy-
ance but, to Blunt’s relief, returned almost at once ‘with a sort
of skip across the room and rubbing his hands together as
one might do on having got rid of a bore’. The gesture gave
Blunt confidence. He delivered Arabi’s messages about the
slave trade and other reforms and explained the mutual
suspicion between Malet and Colvin on the one side and the
Egyptian Nationalists on the other which made pacific develop-
ment impossible. Whereupon Gladstone remarked, ‘almost
pathetically, “What can we do? They are esteemed public
servants and have received honours for their work in
Egypt”.’

As he left, Blunt asked if he might send Arabi some message
in return for those he had brought. Gladstone thought an
instant, then said, ‘I think not’, and, very slowly and deliber-
ately, ‘in a sort of House of Commons voice’: ‘But you are
at liberty to state your impression of my sentiments. ... If
they wish to judge of these, let them read what we say in
Parliament, especially what I say, for I never speak lightly in

1882

EGYPT

H9

Parliament. In our public dispatches we are much hampered
by the opinion of Europe, which we are bound to consider,
and this is not favourable to liberal institutions in Egypt.
But they should read our speeches.’ His voice became natural
again as he thanked Blunt for his letters and for all that he
had told him and begged Blunt to let him hear if any new
combination arose. Gladstone’s extreme kindness as he shook
hands moved Blunt greatly: ‘I was near shedding tears, and
went away feeling that he was a good as well as great man,
and wondering how anyone with so good a heart could have
arrived at being Prime Minister.’

The Gladstone whom Blunt saw that day was ‘a man of
infinite private sympathy with good, and of whom one would
affirm it impossible he should swerve a hair’s breadth from
the path of right.’ Alas, there was another Gladstone: ‘the
opportunist statesman, who was very different from the first,
and whom I was presently to see playing in public “such
fantastic tricks before high Heaven as make the Angels
weep”.’ In March 1882, though occasionally sceptical of
Gladstonian pieties, Blunt had not yet read his Gladstone as
he was destined to read him. Directly after the interview he
wrote to his Cairo friends: with Gladstone on their side,
‘what more was there to fear?’ All that was needed was
for them to be patient till a Commission of Inquiry was
sent.

If his belief in the possibility of influencing Gladstone had
the drawback of leading Blunt to rely too implicitly on
Hamilton’s reassurance and advice, it gave him the necessary
faith to carry through many weeks of feverish activity. Every-
where, at luncheon and dinner parties, at interviews, at formal
meetings — of the Asiatic Society, for instance, to which he
had just been elected — Blunt spoke of Egypt. He was in
great demand since his talk provided entertainment if, for
many people, nothing more serious.

He was also much sought after as a source of information,
imparting news to and from the Nationalists with whom he

150 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

was in constant correspondence. From a talk at the Horse
Guards about military routes into Egypt and other Egyptian
matters with Sir Garnet Wolseley, who said that he had been
consulted two or three times during the winter as to an
immediate occupation of Egypt, Blunt gathered that any
advance on Cairo would be made by way of Ismailia. He
passed on the warning to Sheykh Mohammed Abdu. Through
Button he was brought into touch with ‘Natty’ Rothschild,
for whom he drew up a memorandum on the Egyptian situ-
ation as it affected finance.

Too often his activities met with discouragingly little
success. He laboured in vain to persuade John Morley to
exclude from the Pall Mall Gazette , of which Morley was then
editor, articles that contained material defaming the Nation-
alists ; 7 and again in vain with the manager of The Times
who objected on the score of needless expense to sending out
a special correspondent to Cairo for independent news:
‘English people,’ said the manager, ‘had only two interests in
Egypt, the Suez Canal and their bonds, if they held any’ and
the views of the regular correspondent ‘on these two matters
were what they wanted. Beyond this they did not care in
any special way for the truth.’ It was slight comfort that he
complimented Blunt on his letters, and said that The Times
would be glad to print whatever more he had to say.

Lady Gregory, who supported Blunt ardently during this
time, had a like answer from Chenery, the editor of The Times ,
when she asked him why he allowed his Egyptian corres-
pondent to supply so incorrect an account of all that was
happening there. ‘Chenery said, “I will tell you. It is because
of the influence of the European bondholders over The
Times" l ‘When I told Sir William,’ Lady Gregory wrote,
‘he said, “Don’t tell that to Wilfrid Blunt, or he will have
sandwich men walking with it down Piccadilly to-morrow”.’

i 882

EGYPT

151

3

By the time that Parliament reassembled after the Easter
recess the situation in Egypt had changed: the Nationalist
ministry was again at loggerheads with the Khedive and the
English officials, this time over the fate of the conspirators
in the recently discovered ‘Circassian plot’. Soon the situation
in England itself changed still more disastrously. The
Phoenix Park murders which took place on May 7th con-
firmed English distrust of Nationalism, and alienated even
Gladstone’s sympathy.

At the moment Blunt did not realize the full import of the
atrocity. He saw only that political attention was distracted
from Egyptian problems and, still with faith in Gladstone’s
good will, he tried to recall it by sending the Prime Minister
an ‘ultimatum’: ‘I have said that I must speak the whole
truth if Lord Granville won’t.’ In reply he received a note
from Hamilton which dissuaded him from making at once his
exposition of the state of Egyptian affairs by the assurance
that in Parliament two days hence Granville intended to show
that Liberal policy ‘would be in accordance with Liberal
doctrine’. Hamilton’s assurance, as so often proved to be the
case, was open to various interpretations. Blunt not unnatur-
ally seized upon the one corresponding with his hopes only
to hear in Granville’s speech a repetition of the old threatening
policy of the Joint Note. ‘This then,’ he wrote, ‘was the
famous Liberal policy Hamilton had promised me. I felt
myself absolved from all obligation of reticence toward
Gladstone, who- seemed to have played with and deceived me.’

Something, he determined, must be done at once to frus-
trate the Government’s reactionary plans, above all their
intention of dispatching a fleet to Alexandria in support, it
was evident, of the Khedive. If it could be shown that the
Egyptians were strongly united in what they considered a just
cause surely English Liberals would support them rather than

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1882

152

the Khedive. Retiring to Crabbet he spent a restless night in
plotting. In the morning he sent off on his own responsibility-
eight telegrams to various Egyptian leaders designed to bring
replies showing what he believed to be the truth, that the
civilian leaders and the army stood together firmly with the
people behind them in opposition to the Khedive . 8 He
knew that so independent an act would arouse the anger of
the Foreign Office and bring on a violent commotion of which
he would be the centre. And, sincerely believing himself to
be in the right, he awaited the storm not without a certain
fearful pleasure. The actual result, however, was more than
he bargained for.

At dinner that evening a satisfactory reply came from Sultan
Pasha, the Prime Minister. Blunt at once repeated the message
in wires to Gladstone and, for publication, to The Times. On
the way to London the following day, he received other
answers in the same vein. The morning papers announced
that on the preceding afternoon the Khedive, through Sultan
Pasha’s mediation, had forgiven Arabi. Blunt had ‘won a
first diplomatic victory’. Gladstone’s two private secretaries
congratulated him and, with what savoured of inter-depart-
mental rancour, advised him to write another formal letter to
press home his triumph over the Foreign Office on the ground
of its false information. Hamilton even said that the twenty
pounds the telegram had cost ought to be paid out of the
Secret Service fund.

But rejoicing was premature : the Sheykh El Islam and the
Egyptian Prime Minister recanted — falsely and under intimi-
dation, Blunt was sure. Button, who was enjoying the fray
even more than his cousin since he had no serious interest in
its outcome, advised him to publish a full account of the
proceedings in two letters to Gladstone, one written in triumph,
the other in defeat. The letters were no sooner prepared than
Hamilton dissuaded him from publishing them announcing,
despite his enthusiasm of the previous day, that he thought
the telegrams unfortunate. He said that in any case the fleet

I 8 8 2

EGYPT

U3

was being sent out to Alexandria merely to protect English
subjects and that no violent action of any sort was meditated.
Under his influence Blunt sent his servant David to stop the
publication of the letters.

It was not long before he regretted this action bitterly.
When the letters finally appeared a month afterwards it was
too late for his explanation to make any impression. The
St. James's Gazette already had spoken of him as an incendiary.
Other journals had followed suit. ‘Their language,’ Blunt
thought, ‘reacted on the Government and doubtless also on
Gladstone, though he knew the truth which the public did
not.’ Blunt continued to visit Downing Street, but did so on
a less and less intimate footing. Suspicion had been aroused
on both sides.

Socially, his position of rebellion against the Foreign
Office added savour to his life. He enjoyed to the full the
ironies that the situation brought with it. Not long after the
telegram affair the Blunts, arriving for a week-end with
Lord Portsmouth, Lady Anne’s cousin, at Hurstbourne, found
themselves, to their mingled horror and delight, fellow guests
of Lord and Lady Granville. All the other guests were sym-
pathetic with the Nationalist cause — when Granville was not
present — especially J. R. Lowell, the American Ambassador,
who throughout the summer always supported Blunt’s views
in conversation. Granville himself was amiable, talking
pleasantly to Blunt of every subject except Egypt and telling
a number of particularly neat stories. Later, when a card
arrived from Lady Granville inviting the Blunts to a Foreign
Office party on June 3rd ‘to celebrate the Queen’s birthday’,
Blunt wrote exultantly: ‘I shall keep this as an answer to
Harry Brand’s charge of treason.’

Politically, the telegrams were not so successful. They had
failed signally to calm the Egyptian situation. From the
arrival of the French and English fleets at Alexandria on
May 20th events moved for the worse. Lord Granville’s
permission to Malet to act as he thought fit resulted in the

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1882

154

ultimatum of May 25th issued by Malet and Sienkiewicz, the
French Consul, demanding the resignation of the Ministry
and Arabi’s retirement from Egypt. When two days later
word came that Arabi had resigned, it seemed clear to Blunt
that the Egyptians would have to fight. He felt that he
‘ought to go out and join them’. The thought that he had
not gone while there was still time to patch matters up tor-
mented him. Arabi, he knew, was not a strong man of action.
He was a ‘humanitarian dreamer with little more than a certain
basis of obstinacy for the achievement of his ideals’. He needed
advice and, especially, support in action. Besides, little as
Blunt wanted actually to fight even for the Nationalists, he
had promised to do so. Doubtless the possibilities of leader-
ship made a certain romantic appeal to him: perhaps in his
mind he drew a parallel with Byron’s history. It was a relief
all the same when he learned that Arabi had been reinstated
as Minister of War ‘with something like dictatorial powers’
and there seemed hope of a peaceful settlement.

Lest he should miss this second chance of acting as mediator
he decided to make the plunge into the heat of a Cairo June.
Under Mrs. Howard’s Gladstonian influence he set forth his
pacific intentions in a letter to the Prime Minister. The letter
is long and detailed, idealistic, but not un-barbed. Its general
trend is clear from the last sentences: ‘My idea of a policy
for the Egyptians is, that they should act by a rule diametri-
cally opposite to the common Oriental ones. I would have
them tell the truth, even to their enemies — be more humane
than European soldiers, more honest than their European
creditors. So only can they effect that moral reformation their
religious leaders have in view for them.’

Perhaps not altogether for the worse this time, Hamilton
again interfered. Blunt’s position in Egypt, he said, his known
connection with Gladstone, ‘would be misunderstood, and
make a terrible row’. On the strength of Hamilton’s promise
that there would be no intervention and no troops would be
landed, Blunt agreed not only not to go but also to wire

i 8 8 2 EGYPT 155

Arabi: . . Do not fear ships. No intervention. Issue public
notices in every town for the safety of Europeans.’

Had Blunt heard the speech he was destined on the following
day to hear fall from Gladstone’s lips in Parliament un-
doubtedly he would not have renounced his journey. The
Prime Minister made the ‘astonishing statement’ that Arabi
had ‘thrown off the mask’ and threatened to depose the Khedive
and proclaim Halim, Tewfik’s cousin, Khedive in his stead.
The only possible basis that Blunt could discover for this
statement was a telegram from Malet recording a rumour
which the Khedive himself had said that he hardly believed . 9
‘Yet,’ Blunt observed, ‘on such slender rumour Gladstone
who had declared to me he never spoke lightly in Parliament
and had bidden me wait for his spoken word in the House
of Commons as a message of good-will to the Egyptians, fires
off, to give point to his speech, this quite untrue announcement,
his first definite utterance since I had seen him on Egypt. . . .
It is a curious commentary on the ways of ministers and the
processes of the Gladstonian mind.’ Its effect on Blunt was
complete disillusionment. ‘Never after this,’ he wrote, ‘did
I place the smallest trust in him, or find reason, even when he
came forward as champion of self-government in Ireland and
when I gave him my freest support, to look upon him as
other than the mere Parliamentarian he in truth was.’

CHAPTER VIII

ARABI’S TRIAL

i

Since he had promised not to go out to Egypt himself.
Blunt dispatched Sabunji in his stead and through him
succeeded in influencing Arabi and the other Nationalist
leaders almost as directly as though he had been at Cairo in
person. As Blunt’s representative, Sabunji was received with
open arms by the Nationalists and given their entire con-
fidence. Although he turned out later to be something of an
Oriental scallywag, he was heart and soul with their move-
ment and at this time proved not unworthy either of their trust
or Blunt’s: he communicated Blunt’s letters faithfully to the
Nationalist leaders and their letters to Blunt.

Doubtless seeing that things were coming to a head, the
English Press began to show a more intelligent interest in
Egyptian affairs, many of the papers sending out special
correspondents. News from Egypt, to Blunt’s relief, began
to be more often accurate. Even in the Pall Mall Gazette ,
which in general continued its old fire-eating policy, a strong
article appeared against intervention in Egypt by Frederic
Harrison, ‘the soundest and most courageous man on foreign
politics then in the Liberal party’ Blunt thought, ‘and by far
the most vigorous pamphleteer’. Harrison was quite disinter-
ested personally, his opinions sprang in great part from other
sources than Blunt’s and his methods were often different, but
their connection in work for the Nationalists was henceforth
fairly close . 1

And there was need of much work during the next weeks.
While Blunt was spreading the good tidings sent by Sabunji

156

1882 ARABI’S TRIAL 157

in early June that Arabi had the country behind him, the whole
character of the situation changed again; open hostilities
broke out. On the morning of June nth, at Alexandria, a
small quarrel sprang up between some Christians and Moslems.
It might have been quieted easily had the Governor allowed
the police to intervene. Instead, he egged on the quarrel till
it grew into a riot in which a certain number of Europeans lost
their lives, amongst them a petty officer of H.M.S. Superb ,
and the English, Italian and Greek Consuls were injured.
The whole disturbance was quelled only by the arrival of the
regular troops, whom the Governor, on one pretext or another,
had put off calling in.

The riot caused considerable alarm in England. In his
diary for June 12th Blunt noted: ‘Just as we were leaving
James Street, Lady Malet rushed in wildly, demanding of me
the truth of what I had been doing in Egypt. I told her pretty
nearly. She said my honour was at stake in clearing myself of
the charge of intriguing against my country. She besought
me to calm things down there; and I promised to send a mes-
sage to Arabi not to touch a hair of her son’s head. . . . She
told me people said I had been in conspiracy with Gladstone
against her son’s policy in Egypt. I assured her that Gladstone
was guiltless of my telegrams, and that I accepted the full
responsibility of all I had done. She made me promise to come
and see her; but — such are the miseries of public life — she
looks upon me as Edward’s murderer.’

To Blunt the riot did not seem to be necessarily of an
alarming nature, and a reassuring wire came from Sabunji.
It seemed as if, after all, war might be averted. In reality, he
wrote later, ‘henceforth it was a losing battle, though I fought
it out to the end’.

Blunt himself was worn out. He looked altered, Mrs.
Howard, who met him in the Park observed. Added to the
fact that sleeping or waking he had not had Egypt out of his
head since the crisis began three days earlier, he now received
a telegram of foreboding from Sabunji ending, ‘Recall Malet

158 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

for God’s sake. All curse and will murder him if he con-
tinues.’ Remembering his promise to Lady Malet, Blunt
impressed the danger on Hamilton sufficiently to have Malet
ordered aboard ship. 2

A subsequent wire from Sabunji gave further evidence of
profound disturbance. The riots were being falsely fathered
on the Nationalists. He requested information about the
policy of Gladstone and Granville. Blunt, who had been asked
by Hamilton not to return to Downing Street, since his visits
there were remarked on and created an awkward situation,
passed on the request by letter. Hamilton’s answer, as might
be expected, was hardly satisfactory.

On June 23rd, a letter from Blunt in The Times created a
great sensation. He had written it to Gladstone and published
it by Frederic Harrison’s advice and with the approval of
the Howards, even of the Gladstonian Mrs. Howard. In it
he somewhat cleared up his own position, recapitulating his
connection with Malet and Colvin and the missions that he had
undertaken for them. He pointed out that the British officials,
both misinformed and misinforming, were largely responsible
for forcing the Egyptians into hostility towards England. And
he besought England to use the Conference of great European
powers which met for the first time on that very day as an
opportunity of acknowledging past mistakes and expressing
sympathy with Egyptian freedom. 3

The letter ‘called down a storm of abuse on my head from
Malet’s and Colvin’s friends, and generally from the jingo
and financial elements in the Press and Parliament.’ The
Times published an angry letter from Sir Henry Malet, the
Egyptian Consul’s brother, to which Blunt, hating to quarrel
with old friends, returned a soft answer. Lord Lamington
gave notice of a question in the House of Lords as to Blunt’s
‘unofficial negotiations’ and on June 26th made an indignant
speech against Blunt. The Government, not unnaturally,
was embarrassed by questions concerning Blunt’s unofficial
negotiations as it had fallen into similar difficulties in its Irish

ARAB I’ S TRIAL

159

policy the year before by using W. V. Errington to communi-
cate unofficially with the Pope. Granville, Blunt thought,
looked white and uncomfortable during the debate. But he
admitted that Blunt on one occasion had acted to pacify the
Egyptian army — a fact that Sir Henry Malet had denied.
Colvin’s alternative denials and admissions of having received
help from Blunt made the imbroglio more intricate. Blunt’s
own reaction to all this was characteristic: ‘The more talk the
better.’

News of a quarrel between the British fleet and the Nation-
alists over the fortifications at Alexandria began to appear in
the papers. On July 6th word came that Admiral Seymour
had sent an ultimatum to Arabi, and Blunt wired Sabunji:
‘Avoid meddling with the fleet. Send Abdu with a message
to Gladstone. Patience.’ Blunt was not sure that he had done
wisely in sending such advice, but comforted himself with the
thought that ‘prudence is certainly on the right side.’

The situation grew more critical ; Admiral Seymour
demanded the surrender of the forts in terms impossible for
Arabi to accept; Lord De La Warr asked Blunt to telegraph
the Nationalists advising a compromise. Blunt refused. The
Egyptians could not, he felt, honourably give up their forts.
If England forced war, war it must be. With forlorn hope of
stemming the tide he sent a copy of his Downing Street
correspondence to the Prince of Wales — he had already sent
copies to Cardinal Manning, Lord Dufferin and James
Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century.

On July 1 ith the bombardment of Alexandria began. By
July 13th the forts had been silenced; but there were no signs
of Egypt’s yielding. It was too late for any sort of prevention.
Alexandria had been evacuated by the Egyptian army, was in
flames and undergoing a new massacre by roughs. 4 Blunt was
thankful that the army was ‘safe out of the mouse-trap’, and
by his advice, he thought, entrenched out of reach of the guns.

On July 14th Blunt received a letter that he was asked to
communicate to Gladstone. As he explained to the Prime

160 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1881-1882

Minister it had been dictated by Arabi to Sabunji at Alex-
andria and neither signed nor sealed by the Egyptian leader
— a circumstance that allowed Arabi later, when charged with
having written the letter, to deny it, and that caused Blunt to
be taunted by his enemies with having forged the letter. It
was a firm statement of the Egyptian position : the Egyptians
would not, unless attacked, wage war and they felt that war
was unnecessary, that, with good will on both sides, a com-
promise might be reached; but if attacked, they would defend
themselves to the utmost of their ability and would regard
the defence as in the nature of a religious war. Punch ' s remark
on this letter was: l The Times , last week spoke of some portion
of Arabi’s letter to Gladstone Pasha as a “blunt announcement”.
Taken as a whole, it might have been termed a “Wilfrid Blunt
pronouncement”.’

Through Button, Blunt learned that the Prince of Wales
wished for a copy of the letter. He accordingly sent him one.
It possibly strengthened the Prince’s faith in the ‘very good
authority’ which he wrote to Lord Granville on July 31st he
had for believing that ‘Arabi was in receipt of confidential
intelligence and encouragement from England’. ‘Blunt,’ he
wrote, ‘was not merely sending out secret intelligence, but was
about to join Arabi with some £ 20,000 , which he had raised
by the sale of his jewels and furniture. “Can nothing be done,”
the Prince asked, “to stop this disloyal and eccentric Jesuit?
People are beginning to speak very seriously of his conduct,
and no wonder.” ’

In reality, feeling that as a member of the besieging nation
he could do no more, Blunt retired to Crabbet to stay until the
struggle was over, and spent a sad summer writing his
‘Apologia’ for the September number of the Nineteenth Century.
He took no hand in the Egyptian War except in so far as by
past deeds or indirect participation he may be said to have
effected it. His timely suggestion of a probable attack on
Egypt from the Suez Canal side, he felt, had prompted Arabi
to dig the lines of Tel-el-Kebir so that the Nationalists were

i 8 8 2

ARAB PS TRIAL

161

prepared for resistance there when Wolseley occupied Ismailia
on August 2 xst. He helped in a small measure to defeat the
Nationalists by unwittingly aiding Palmer, the Agent of the
English Government, in the work of bribing the Bedouins of
the Sinai peninsula; but of this he did not know until some time
later when Palmer’s diaries were put into his hands and,
ironically, in the interests of justice, he felt called upon to
defend Palmer and try to extract recognition and remuneration
for the family of their agent from the English Government.
During the war he made no attempt even to advise the
Nationalists.

Such abstinence was difficult for his fellow countrymen to
believe in. When a Reuter’s telegram announced that seven-
teen cases of firearms had been found at Sheykh Obeyd, they
attacked him in the Press. The seventeen cases were in reality
a box of seventeen rifles and revolvers and one small brass
cannon that Blunt had intended to take to Arabia in x 8 8 1 and
had stored and forgotten at Sheykh Obeyd when the journey
was abandoned. Ten years later his cousin Colonel Guy
Wyndham took him to view the arsenal on the Cairo citadel
where he came upon the box and, with no difficulty, had it
restored to him. In the summer of 1882, however, it served
as proof in England that Blunt not only talked a great deal of
traitorous nonsense but actually supplied the enemies of his
country with firearms.

2

On September 13 th the Nationalists were decisively defeated
at Tel-el-Kebir. Many years later Blunt wrote in the ‘Quatrains
of Life’:

Here lay the camps. The sound from one rose clear,

A single voice through the thrilled listening air.

‘There is no God but God’, it cried aloud.

‘Arise, ye faithful, ’tis your hour of prayer.’

i 62 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

And from the other? Hark the ignoble chorus,

Strains of the music halls, the slums before us.

Let our last thought be as our lives were there,

Drink and debauchery! The drabs adore us.

And these were proved the victors on that morrow,

And those the vanquished, fools, beneath war’s harrow.

And the world laughed applauding what was done,

And if the angels wept none heard their sorrow.

Three days after the victory The Times announced the
capitulation of Cairo and Arabi’s surrender to Drury Lowe.
At the same time it published a telegram from its Alexandrian
correspondent, Moberly Bell, who had always upheld Anglo-
Khedivial views, demanding ‘exemplary punishment’ for
eleven of the Nationalist leaders including Arabi. Blunt again
came forward — this time for the campaign with which his
name is most often connected, the defence of Arabi.

His first act was to wire Button asking for news of the
official attitude toward the prisoners. On receiving an
unsatisfactory reply, he wrote asking Hamilton to let him
know should the prisoners be in danger of death. Hamilton
fobbed him off with a casual note. Whereupon Blunt wrote
direct to Gladstone, pointing out the difficulties of obtaining a
fair trial for the prisoners and saying that he and some of his
friends, at their own expense, proposed to secure the services
of competent English counsel for the principal prisoners. He
would, he said, esteem it a favour if he were told as early as
possible what would be the exact nature of the trial and what
the principal charges made.

Even with all his experience of Gladstone it seemed impos-
sible to Blunt that the Prime Minister from whom he had
received two communications, one of them within the last
weeks, condemning atrocities, would not approve his humane
attitude. He feared only that Arabi himself might refuse his
assistance as more damaging than helpful since he had pro-
bably been told that Blunt was quite out of favour with the

i 8 8 2

ARAB I’ S TRIAL

163

Government. Whatever the event, the trial filled Blunt with
apprehension. ‘We are the rearguard of a beaten army,’ he
wrote, ‘where there are plenty of blows and no glory to be
won. As to Cairo, what I cared most for in it is gone beyond
recovery. Egypt may get a certain share of financial ease but
she will not get liberty, at least not in our time, and the blood-
less revolution so nearly brought about has been drowned in
blood.’

It was in no optimistic frame of mind that, on Lord De La
Warr’s advice and with Button’s approval, Blunt arranged
to send A. M. Broadley out to Egypt as defender of the
Nationalist leaders. Broadley, a man of much ability and well
informed on Eastern matters, had been a practising lawyer in
the Consular Courts at Tunis, and latterly, The Times corres-
pondent there. He was now to return to Tunis to await the
instructions to proceed to Egypt that Blunt intended to send
him as soon as the consent of the Foreign Office could be
obtained. It was useless for any counsel to go out to Egypt
without governmental authority. He would be helpless,
probably even unable to see his client.

Button then rendered the cause great service by managing
an adroit private venture, not even making it known to Blunt
until it was accomplished. He inserted an announcement
in The Times on September 20th that Arabi and his com-
panions were not to be executed without the consent of the
English Government and that they would be defended by
efficient counsel. He possessed not the slightest authority
for this; but, The Times having made the statement, the
Government found it difficult to go back upon so humane a
decision publicly attributed to it.

At the moment, however, Button’s move, inexcusable in
itself, worked no noticeable good. Blunt could extract no
satisfactory reply from the Government, despite the fact that
he pressed the matter as was his wont in several letters to
Gladstone. Again with Lord De La Warr and Button, he
agreed to send out to Egypt at once the first briefless barrister

x6 4 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

he could lay hands on ‘to act as circumstances should suggest’,
until Broadley arrived there. They combed the Inns of Court
and hit upon the Hon. Mark Napier, the best agent, Blunt
thought, that they could possibly have found for their purpose.
He was resourceful, a determined fighter, had a good know-
ledge of law, and spoke French fluently — a necessary quali-
fication for Cairo. And, as the son of a former British Ambas-
sador, he was little ‘likely to be imposed upon by the prestige
and mystery with which diplomacy is invested for outsiders
and which gives it so much of its strength.’ Taking a cipher
code, two or three letters of introduction and a handbag, he
started that night by the Brindisi mail for Alexandria.

Napier arrived at Cairo on October 6th to find that the sole
and very weak protection offered the prisoners was the
appointment by the English Government of two Englishmen
who had a knowledge of Arabic to be present at the pro-
ceedings. Luckily they were honest, humane men, old
acquaintances of Blunt: Sir Charles Wilson, with whom the
Blunts had travelled from Aleppo to Smyrna in 1881, and
Ardern Beaman whom they had known at Damascus and who
was, at the time of the trial, Malet’s interpreter at the Cairo
Agency. As they were favourably impressed by Arabi’s
dignified bearing these two men gave Napier what help they
could. But Napier himself could get nowhere. His applica-
tions to see Arabi went unanswered, shuffled back and
forth between Malet and the Egyptian Minister of Interior.

On October 12th Blunt received a sudden warning from
De La Warr, who was still in communication with the Foreign
Office, that unless vigorous steps were taken Arabi’s life was in
extreme danger. Blunt hurried to Button and with him agreed
that a supreme appeal must be made to public opinion; the
Foreign Office must be directly attacked and Gladstone com-
promised and forced into a declaration of policy. In an open
letter to the Prime Minister — the only means of attack at
hand — he pilloried both Gladstone and Granville. Button
‘plumped’ it into the next morning’s Times where Chenery

ARAB I’ S TRIAL

1882

165

‘generously’ gave it prominence and directed attention to it
in a leading article.

The Foreign Office capitulated then and there. It admitted
the necessity of a fair trial and instructed Malet to
withdraw from opposition and treat counsel sent to Arabi
favourably. Blunt thought that Bright, learning the truth from
his letter, had gone to Gladstone and told him plainly that he,
Gladstone, would be disgraced through all history as a renegade
from his humane principles if he permitted an unfair trial.
Or perhaps the revelations likely to be brought out in the trial
by English counsel terrified both the Khedive and the English
Governments. In any case the supreme point of danger was

But Blunt’s life was no easier. Only the first round had
been won ; and by most of his compatriots he was looked upon
at best as a sentimental mischief maker, at worst as a traitor.
His one-time sympathetic supporter, Lord Houghton,
remarked: ‘The fellow knows he has a handsome head and he
wants it to be seen on Temple Bar’; Lord Houghton was
‘quite rabid about Egypt’ and observed to Lady Gregory
that he wished ‘Arabi and Blunt had been shot’. Sir William
Gregory, unlike his wife, had for some time ceased to uphold
Blunt; in a long letter to Sir Henry Layard after the battle
of Tel-el-Kebir he wrote, ‘I view all these things differently
from Blunt, who pushes things to first principles, but,’ he
added generously, ‘I think that Blunt deserves great credit
for the bold and indefatigable manner in which he has fought
this battle almost single-hearted. He has fought for Egypt
alone, I have fought for England first and Egypt also.’

This attitude, that to fight for Egypt was to war against
England, was hard to shake. To Blunt, to fight for Egypt was
to try to bring England to her senses and save her from
future discredit and difficulty. ‘Let me ask my countrymen,’
he wrote later in the Nineteenth Century , ‘to believe that . . .
I have been fighting the battle not only of truth and justice,
but also of what I conceived to be distinctly my own country’s

1 66

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1882

interest. ... It has been to prevent a crime that I have
laboured — alas, in vain!’ That his pleasure in the paradox
obscures for the sober-minded both his sincerity and the
soundness of his reasoning, in no way detracts from its justice,
or, in the long run, its expediency.

The anxiety of the Queen as shown in her correspondence
of this time with her Prime Minister reflects what all felt whose
point of view was limited by temperament or circumstances.
In a letter of October 14th, from Balmoral, to Gladstone, she
wrote: ‘It seems to the Queen that we are acting vy strangely
. . . There is of course nothing to be said against his [AraSi’s]
having a fair trial as any other Oriental but it seems to the Queen
as if all the delay wh is being caused by this great anxiety to
facilitate his defence by an Englishman (!!!) will do incalculable
mischief — & we may see fresh disturbances break out in
Egypt if the English Govt & a small portion of radicals &
others in England actuated by a morbid sentimentality —
appear to be so intensely interested in a Man — who betrayed
his sovereign & is certainly indirectly if not even directly the
cause of the loss of life of so many Europeans on the io.th of
June — in the burning of Alexandria & in the false use of the
flag of truce?’

Unlike Lord Houghton, who had written that if he went to
Egypt, Blunt must be sure to bring back Arabi to dine with
him, the Queen continued her letter with the cutting observa-
tion : ‘The Queen feels sure that Mr. Gladstone cld not wish
this nation to stultify itself by allowing Arabi — if acquitted of
the worst crimes for wh he is to be tried, to come here and be
lionised and made a Hero of — as Cattawayo was.’ 5

She quite overlooked in her arraignment of Arabi the fact
that he had led his people not in rebellion against his sovereign,
the Sultan, or against the Khedive, but in a defensive war
against a nation that had no sovereign rights over the Egyptians
and that had made war on them for — from the Egyptian point
of view — its own gain.

i 8 8 2

ARABI’S TRIAL

167

3

While feeling rode high in England against Blunt’s endea-
vours, at Cairo things began to go prosperously. Broadley,
who arrived on October 1 8 th, was admitted with Napier to
Arabi’s cell on October 22nd and got from him the ground
work of a strong defence. Important papers and letters,
hitherto concealed in Arabi’s house, were brought to Broadley,
News of their discovery struck panic to the Khedivial Palace.
Broadley, a past master in the art of treating with journalists,
with the assistance of lavish hospitality at Blunt’s expense,
soon had the correspondents with whom Cairo was swarming
under his thumb.

Granville at this point took, as Blunt remarked, the wisest
course open to him in view of the general muddle : he entrusted
the whole matter to Lord Dufferin for settlement. Learning
from Button of this new move, Blunt sent off a long letter of
instructions to Broadley, urging him, since the defence held
the trump cards in Arabi’s documents, to stand out for nothing
less than honourable acquittal. True to character he wanted
no compromise.

Broadley’s and Napier’s communications and more than all
a letter from Ardern Beaman gave Blunt every hope of success.
Beaman seemed a witness of unimpeachable authority. He
had had charge of the Cairo Agency during Malet’s absence
in the last two weeks before the bombardment, where being a
good Arabic scholar, he had learned to know the situation
thoroughly. The Government had set its seal upon his integrity
by naming him to be present at the trial. He had now resigned
from his post as English interpreter of the British Agency in
order to devote himself during the remainder of the trial to the
service of the prisoner’s defence and had been able by way of
Wilson, whose eyes he had opened, to convince Malet of the
error of his opinions. Malet, even against his own interests,
now was helping those who acted for the Nationalists. Dufferin

168 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882

too, seemed gradually to become favourably disposed towards
the defence.

Letters and telegrams flew between Blunt and the Cairo
defence as they continued until the end to do. Blunt spent
himself in writing advice and exhortation to the barristers and
in whipping up enthusiasm in England by the only means open
to him, the usual letters to The Tunes and personal conversation.
He gained a certain number of adherents for, as A. W. King-
lake observed, ‘there is a fire about Mr. Blunt which must
command a following’. But he was doomed once more to
disappointment. After the first few weeks of high, if inter-
mittent, hope, compromise again loomed on the horizon.
Word came from the barristers that though they could disprove
other charges against Arabi, they could not with any certainty
disprove his complicity in the burning of Alexandria. 8 If Blunt
held out for acquittal they foresaw a long and exceedingly
expensive trial which, should public opinion and the unreliable
Foreign Office turn against them, might result in Arabi’s being
found guilty and executed.

With no financial aid it was impossible for Blunt to assume
the responsibility of a long and vexed trial, for the cost of
proceedings even up to this time had been high — Broadley’s
bill already ran to £3000. Clinging to his belief, however, that
honourable acquittal was the only just solution of Arabi’s fate,
Blunt, much as he disliked doing so, asked in The Times for
subscriptions. The plea brought many valuable names to his
assistance and a gratifying number of sympathetic letters;
General Gordon wrote characteristically: ‘Don’t mind being
abused, don’t mind being praised; you remain yourself after
it all.’ Only ^200, however, was subscribed in actual money.
Beyond that sum Blunt was obliged to pay the entire cost —
which, in the interests of justice, he did ungrudgingly. Com-
mended for it by a friend in later years, he remarked, ‘and have
I eaten a chop the less?’

Not only was it now financially impossible to run the risk
of long drawn-out legal proceedings, but De La Warr, Button

ARABI’S TRIAL

1883

169

and the others who up to this time had firmly supported him
advised compromise. With extreme reluctance Blunt wired
the barristers his consent to their making what settlement they
could so long as they did not agree to internment for Arabi.
When Broadley’s telegram came saying that the sentence of
exile to some place to be settled on by Blunt and the Foreign
Office, with a suitable allowance and compensation for loss of
property, could be obtained for Arabi and the other leaders if
they would plead guilty of rebellion and that amnesty would
be granted to the majority of the Nationalists, Blunt capitu-
lated. ‘Have consulted De La Warr,’ he wired, ‘we approve
full discretion on basis of telegram just received.’

The Foreign Office had gained what it most wanted: admis-
sion of rebellion to justify intervention. With Lord Dufferin’s
aid the trial was carried through successfully on December
3rd. The next day Broadley wired : ‘Arabi delighted at result
and sends thanks . . . Dufferin brick,’ and added with evident
relish: ‘Anglo-Egyptian Colony furious.’

Owing chiefly to Blunt’s efforts, Arabi and his fellow
prisoners had escaped not only with their lives, but with partial
freedom. 7 The place of Arabi’s exile was easily arranged: the
Island of Ceylon, ‘the traditional place of exile of our father
Adam when driven out of Paradise. . . . No more honourable
one could possibly have been fixed upon’.

But Blunt could not rest. The exact terms of the arrange-
ment come to with Dufferin were committed to writing by
neither him nor Broadley, thereby causing later much trouble
and misunderstanding. A worse oversight was the failure to
define the promised general amnesty. Moreover, Lord
Dufferin’s long awaited dispatch published at the end of his
mission at Cairo was a deep disappointment — ‘a comedy to
those who think, a tragedy to those who feel’, commented
Lady Gregory. It recommended, Blunt said, merely ‘that
mockery of self-government, a consultative assembly without
initiative, without legislative power, and without control over
ministers. ... no change was to be made in the restored

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

170

1883

Circassian regime, Tewfik was to be retained with a new lease
of confidence from the protecting powers, and the development
of free institutions which were hinted at were to be left to the
tender mercies of their bitterest enemies. The sole alternative
to such a poor chance of good was that sketched in the dispatch
where the possible control of a “masterly Resident” was
named’. The whole recommendation read to Blunt and other
pro-Nationalists like a bitter jest.

Again Blunt took up the cudgels, making his chief occupa-
tion in 1883, as it had been in 1882, the effort to procure
justice in Egypt. The struggle, carried on throughout both
winter and summer was hard ; meetings at his house in James
Street and elsewhere, and letters to The Times occurred almost
daily. The political strain was made doubly great by the
discovery that Broadley had acted with duplicity in various
respects, and by Beaman’s unaccountably disavowing his
favourable attitude. 8 By this double-dealing, defences and
charges on several important points were lamentably con-
fused and only with difficulty at least partially straightened
out.

Repeatedly word came to Blunt from Egypt of illegitimate
imprisonments and hangings in punishment of trumped-up
charges. In connection with the case of Suleiman Bey Sami,
charged with the burning of Alexandria, Blunt and Lord
Randolph Churchill worked together for the first time : ‘thanks
especially to Churchill’s energy that summer’, Bluntwrote, ‘and
to the great publicity he was able to give the Khedive’s con-
nection with the riots, I have the satisfaction of remembering
that we succeeded at last in putting a stop to the worst bar-
barities of the restored regime at Cairo, nor was any further
political hanging after that summer permitted as long as
Gladstone remained in office’.

1882-1883

ARABICS TRIAL

171

4

By the end of this Egyptian experience Blunt had become
a confirmed anti-imperialist. He summed up the iniquities of
Imperialism in 1882 in The Wind and the Whirlwind — ‘the
real monument of that time’, Lady Gregory thought — a
rapidly moving and somewhat strident ‘diatribe in verse’ that
none the less carries the conviction of sincerity in the heat of
battle and ‘still stands as an indictment and a prophecy’. No
man believed more strongly than he in close relations with other
nations or races, or put his belief more often into action, but
henceforth he was a ‘Little Englander’. Imperialism had come
to mean to him the desire of a powerful nation for self-aggrand-
izement at the expense of the more admirable qualities of both
ruled and ruling nations.

As he wrote later when discussing his attitude toward Irish
affairs, his point of view was essentially ethical in its basis:
‘Christianity acknowledged at least this right to the weak races
of mankind, that they had their place in the general scheme of
things and equality in God’s sight with the most efficient’. He
agreed with those who based their political views on the teach-
ings of modern science, he said, only to the point of being
himself a convinced evolutionist, of believing that ‘the world
of living beings has been slowly evolved from the lowest to the
highest forms, and that we men have a genealogic kinship, to
go no farther, with all vertebrate life’. Unlike some of those
who held the same point of view, he interpreted this as mean-
ing that ‘between the races of mankind the kinship is here
close, there distant, but it is only a difference of degree, and if
we have any moral duty towards our fellow men all must be
included in it. . . . The natural law appealed to by an im-
perialist does not show attacks made by race on race as prac-
tised in the animal world. The struggle to live resulting in the
survival of the fittest is not in nature between species and
species, but between individuals of the same species, nor is it

I 7 2 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882-1883

decided by appeals to force or superior cunning, but by the
power of endurance and adaptability to environment. There is
nothing in non-human nature, at least among warm-blooded
vertebrates, comparable at all to our wars and our combinations
to despoil and exterminate. These are essentially human vices,
growths of the natural world, which apart from them is a world
of mutual concession and unbroken racial peace. There is
nothing in Darwin’s teaching really to suggest the contrary,
or to excuse the modern rule of race selfishness and organized
colour aggression’.

There was another aspect of the case not less convincing to
Blunt, which, ‘for want of a better adjective’, he called, ‘the
aesthetic’: ‘the natural world’, he wrote with a bias almost
Wordsworthian, ‘is one everywhere of beauty, of health, of
happiness. Of beauty because of its variety; of health, because
of its conformity to type ; of happiness, because of its suitability
to its surroundings. To my view of things the insistence of a
single race, be that race my own or another’s, to usurp more
than just that limited space in the world for which it is best
fitted, is an insolent pretension sanctioned by nothing in the
natural law and violating its harmony. . . . The world would
be a poor misshapen deformity were it planted from pole to
pole with a single crop of wheat; and how valueless will it have
become, according to any canon of beauty, when the Anglo-
Saxon rule of order and law shall have overspread both hemi-
spheres — which may God forbid — and established over them
its debased industrialism, its crude cookery and its flavourless
religious creed’.

Forms of government did not concern Blunt except in so
far as they were acceptable or not, to the people governed. If
the people were content with their government, it might take
any form whatsoever. He was strongly in favour of the
Government of Nejd under that autocrat of autocrats, the Emir
Ibn Rashid; on the other hand, many years later, he condemned
the Democratic Government of the United States of America
since it neglected to suppress the lynchings of negroes, a large

ARABI’S TRIAL

1882-1883

173

part of its population. He opposed the Khedivial Government
not because it was autocratic, but because it was sustained only
by foreign powers and then re-imposed by England against
the will of the Egyptian people — Arabs, Copts, even many
Circassians. Whether or not he upheld the people as a whole,
apart from the individuals among all classes who were his
personal friends, because he loved them, affects the con-
sistency and sincerity of his point of view no more than does the
allegation, often brought against him, that on his own estates
and even in his own family he himself was a complete autocrat.
It may readily be admitted that he was — but what dissension
arose, sprang from other causes than the fact of his autocracy.

His point of view was supported at too great cost to himself
to have been the outcome merely of vanity or egotism. It was
held neither lightly nor sentimentally. From a sound basis of
experience it developed logically step by step: his finding,
during his journey through Asia Minor in 1873, that Eastern
ways of government had something to recommend them; his
recognition in Nejd in 1879, of the happiness which a nation,
however poor in material ways, might attain to if left to itself
without foreign interference; his discovery, in Iraq during the
same year, of the disastrous results brought about by corrupt
foreign rule of a weaker, poorer nation ; his suspicion, aroused
at Simla in 1879—80, that the value to India of the paternal
government of England was in large measure sham; his
conviction induced by the study of Islam in 1880, of the
possibility of a progressive liberal movement in Islam; and the
final death, in the disillusionments of 1882-83, of his faith in
the disinterestedness of the English Government.

In view of these disillusionments and the conviction with
which a man of his temperament holds his beliefs, it is not
wholly surprising that Blunt should have taken every oppor-
tunity of showing up all that redounded to the discredit of those
who held, and acted upon, an opposite opinion. They seemed
to him both stupid and inexcusably wicked. Despite his years
in the Diplomatic Service, he had little understanding of the

174 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882-1883

political web in which politicians find themselves enmeshed.
Certainly he had no patience with it. He saw the issue as a
question of right and wrong, of English honour and Egyptian
liberty against English financial greed and official weakness.
He was never able to compromise and obligations undertaken
by the Government, measures made necessary by the pressure
of political expediency, which drew the Government from the
course that seemed to him morally and ideally right, were to
him obligations and measures that the Government should
avoid or ignore.

But, though Blunt’s sincerity is obvious and though his
scorn of the political game is understandable, it is impossible
not to suspect that he enjoyed the excitement and importance
both of being at the centre of the fray and also of stirring it up.

For human nature is an earthy fruit,

Mired at the stem and fleshy at the root,

And thrives with folly’s mixon best o’erlaid,

Nor less divinely so, when all is said.

In a measure at any rate, his scorn of opponents was owing
to personal pique and, having thrown in his lot with the
Nationalists, he was forced by pride to win their — his — success.
He delighted in catching out his adversaries in unfortunate
situations, in collecting stories of their social failures, their less
happy attempts at literary and artistic pursuits, and their
unflattering photographs. The pleasures of irony often led him
too far. And undoubtedly he was susceptible, though not blind
to flattery. Perhaps, also, his attitude toward those whom he sup-
ported savoured too strongly of the beneficent lord and master.

Many of Blunt’s contemporaries, who were not unnaturally
irritated by his thrusting himself unofficially into official
business, saw only these less admirable aspects of his political
work. His very enthusiasm rendered him suspect. The
multiplicity of his gifts and interests, such as might have been
esteemed in a man of the sixteenth century, were regarded with
suspicion by his nineteenth-century contemporaries with their

ARABI’S TRIAL

1882-1883

175

tendency to specialization. His position in society, more
especially his relations with women; his tall slender figure,
proud head and piercing eyes — he was reputed one of the four
most beautiful men in England — and his subtly modulated
voice; even the perfection of his dress and his affectation in
private of Arab robes, detracted from his weight in politics.
And with this seeming frivolity went his habit of returning to
first principles for the solution of political tangles : a fantastic
juxtaposition.

The impression got about that his words were not trust-
worthy. Probably they were as trustworthy as anyone’s; few
politicians, however honourable they may otherwise be, escape
misrepresenting the case at one time or another for the sake of
expediency or denying what they know to be the fact. 9 It was
perhaps excusable if Blunt used the weapons granted his
adversaries in gaining what he considered to be of vital
importance — and all too natural that, against vested interests,
he should have failed. In any case, in politics his contem-
poraries used him and also his information when it served their
turn, though they seldom acknowledged it and seldom either
directly followed his advice or accepted his judgment.

As the Egyptian war recedes and its political consequences
fall into perspective, Blunt stands out as a man who fearlessly
put into action in the field of foreign politics the professed
moral beliefs of his fellow Englishmen, stripping away the
sham defences that divorced them from practical politics,
sparing himself neither odium nor expense of any kind. 10 To
many of the ever-growing number of people who are more and
more sternly questioning the policy of pre-1914 days, funda-
mental justice may well seem to have been on Blunt’s side;
and ultimate expediency may also appear to have lain in the
ways which he advised following.

Blunt himself later was not sure that he had been right in
urging Arabi and the other fellah leaders to stand firm even
against war. Yet he could not repent of it, for the attention
paid to fellahin grievances after that time, he thought, was the

i 7 6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1882-1883

result of Arabi’s persistence fostered by himself. England had
been obliged to listen to the complaints of the Nationalists and
ultimately to remedy most of their material wrongs. Material
prosperity was not synonymous with the well-being of the
nation. But, since the native population had been able to hold
its own against foreign intrusion as owner of the soil, the nation
would remain alive and in time might obtain self-government.
And then, he wrote, £ the armed struggle of 1882 will appear
to them in its true light as the beginning of their national life,
and one, as such, glorious in their annals.’

If he sometimes questioned his part in bringing on the
Egyptian war, he never ceased to regret that England had not
supported the Nationalists rather than the Khedive. Arabi
and the other Nationalist leaders alone had shown themselves
capable of ruling Egypt peaceably since they, not the Khedive,
had the country behind them. Had they been given English
protection they would have developed a state strong enough
to hold its own and willing to work in friendly accord with
English interests. In backing the wrong horse England had
discredited herself and had set the stage to her own ultimate
disadvantage, incurring a vast expenditure of money, energy,
and anxiety in a hopeless task.

His own apologia is what he called advisedly the ‘Secret
History Series’, of which the first, The Secret History of the
English Occupation of Egypt , centres about the Egyptian war of
1882. He took for granted the reader’s knowledge of other,
and particularly official histories, intending his book to
supplement and correct them. It is based on personal exper-
ience, hearsay, conversations, letters, reflections, gathered up
to the time of its publication in 1907; and it is composed
chiefly of excerpts from his dairies which, in order to give the
contemporary mise-en-scene intentionally contain much that is
not political. Being a personal and vivid narrative of his own
life during 1881-82 it is lively reading even for those un-
interested in Egypt, and creates an unforgettable impression
of its author.

CHAPTER IX

CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN

i

Undiscouraged by his political struggle of the past two
years, Blunt made up his mind in 1883 before publishing a
history of the Egyptian revolution and the intrigues which had
ruined it, to visit first the Nationalist exiles in Ceylon, and
then, in order to round out his knowledge of the Islamic
situation, Mohammedan India. On the way he, and Lady
Anne who was to accompany him, would pass through Egypt.
A few days before starting he was called on in James Street
by Sir James Knowles, editor of the Nineteenth Century , and
one of Gladstone’s friends. The Prime Minister, Knowles
said, was thinking of recalling Arabi to Egypt: ‘he only
needed an excuse of some public kind to do so’. It was thought
that Blunt ‘might usefully suggest’ to his Egyptian friends
that, if they returned Arabi as a member of the General
Assembly for which elections were about to be held, ‘it would
serve as a reason for urging his recall from exile’.

Since Hamilton seemed to approve the plan Blunt took it
that Knowles’s message had been given on Gladstone’s
authority. He had no reason, of course, to trust Gladstone
and, as he wrote to Mrs. Howard, he suspected that the
Foreign Office wished to stir up just enough trouble in regard
to the elections to make them appear spontaneous. Having
used him to this end the Government probably would repudiate
him. But even at the risk of incurring odium he felt that he
should take whatever chance offered to obtain Arabi’s return.
And the chance seemed brighter than heretofore: Malet and
Colvin were to be replaced, he also learned from Knowles, by

M 177

178 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1883

Major Baring who had a reputation for large-mindedness and
was believed to be in full accord with liberal principles.

His first impression of Baring was favourable: ‘he imposes
on one a good deal as a man of sense and integrity, and without
being exactly brilliant, seems capable of original ideas’. But he
was not open-minded on the subject of recalling the exiles : ‘this
was quite out of the question’. And when Blunt, not mention-
ing Knowles’s revelations, said he understood something in the
order of a restoration was desired in Downing Street, Baring
did not take up the point. He replied merely that he intended
to support the Khedive and the Circassians to the limit of his
power. ‘It was useless talking further. Whatever Gladstone
may dream of, or pretend to dream,’ said Blunt, ‘it is clear the
Foreign Office has not changed its mind .’ 1

The joyous welcome given him by the Nationalists some-
what soothed his spirits ruffled by Baring’s rebuff to his political
schemes. An Arabic paper published a laudatory greeting and
the Phare d' Alexandrie a long article describing the Nationalists’
pleasure at his return and the corresponding displeasure of the
Khedive. One old Egyptian, Salim Basalim, said to Blunt: ‘there
are many in this town who, if they knew you had passed down the
street, would kiss the dust of your footsteps.’ Having uttered
this flattery he looked about in a frightened way and said he
must go. ‘They are all in terror of their lives,’ wrote Blunt.
Only one young Nationalist soldier showed any courage, averr-
ing that the soldiers were ready to kill their English officers, a
suggestion that Blunt quashed without hesitation.

His actions during the few days at Cairo could not be inter-
preted as indiscreet except in one case. In answer to a message
from an Egyptian imprisoned unjustly in the Zaptieh gaol,
Blunt wrote asking Baring’s permission to visit the prison. No
answer came. So Blunt effected an entrance unassisted, and
saw the Egyptian and four others who asked him to look after
their interests. The following day brought Baring’s answer —
a refusal. At once Blunt wrote to tell the Resident of his visit
and to recommend the prisoners to his protection. Three days

i 8 8 3 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 179

later Baring sent a dispatch to Granville enclosing a circular
issued to the mudirs that he hoped would clear the gaols of all
persons improperly detained. He followed it with another
containing a copy of a decree granting amnesty to all offenders
accused of crimes connected with the rebellion, except murder
or rape. The result was that the five prisoners whom Blunt had
visited were released. T learned the news a few weeks later in
Ceylon,’ wrote Blunt years afterwards, ‘and that it was due to
my intervention, though I cannot remember that any of the
prisoners wrote personally to thank me. My action on their
behalf was, I believe, a chief reason for my exclusion from
Egypt during the following three years, for Baring resented
my interference with what ought to have been his sole business.’

The ship Ghoorkha in which the Blunts sailed for Ceylon
proved ‘a detestable conveyance, overcrowded, swarming with
vermin, and miserably provided’. They had hardly got aboard
when Blunt developed a low fever that rapidly grew into a
serious illness. There was no doctor and no means of caring
for a sick person. He was driven out of his cabin by its dis-
comforts and laid on a table in the saloon, where he passed days
of misery in the heat, cared for by his wife and her maid Cowie,
a devoted and admirable nurse. With their fellow passengers,
a rough set of Colonial English planters from India, Assam and
Burmah, they had a constant battle for existence.

At Colombo, Arabi and Mahmud Sami, a civilian Nationalist
leader who had also suffered exile, came abroad to escort the
Blunts to the country house that Sami had prepared for them.
A deputation of Mohammedans welcomed them ashore.
Flowers decorated the way to their house, some miles from the
landing-place; a triumphal arch spanned the entrance; fire-
works and illuminations were set off in their honour. But
Blunt was too ill to be conscious of the festivities.

Gradually he recovered and learned from the exiles much
that he afterwards related in the first volume of the ‘Secret His-
tory Series’. He also obtained from them a clear statement of
the policy they would recommend the Government of Egypt

i8o WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1883

to follow and sent it with a letter to The Times where it was
published on December 13 th. 2 Unfortunately, during their
ten months in Ceylon the old quarrel between Circassian and
Arab had broken out. The exiles were divided into two parties
headed respectively by Mahmud Sami, a Circassian though a
Nationalist, and Arabi, the fellah. Though he respected Sami
and was obliged to rebuke Arabi strongly in various matters of
domestic dispute, Blunt still felt Arabi to be a ‘whale among
minnows’. ‘In spite of faults and failings, there is something
great about him which compels one’s respect. His faults are
all the faults of his race, his virtues are his own.’ ‘I have been
more than ever impressed during my present visit,’ wrote Blunt
in his letter to The Times , ‘with the reality of Arabi’s claim to
be considered a patriot and a man of genius. By a man of genius
I understand one who is capable of large and new ideas, who
has the passion to impress these strongly upon others, and who
above all possesses the courage and persistence to work them to
their end. These qualities Arabi certainly has, and I know of no
other Egyptian of whom anything corresponding can be said.’

In spite of the exiles’ disturbing jealousy and bickering,
Blunt doubted if he had ever been happier than at Colombo.
‘I have had,’ he wrote, ‘such satisfaction as seldom comes on
earth, that of seeing the bread one has cast on the waters return
to one a hundredfold, a feeling that at last the power to do good
has been won, and more than one’s wishes granted.’

Periods of recovery from severe illness he was apt to remem-
ber with especial pleasure, the convalescence at Colombo no
less than others. The long days of semi-invalidism were full
of contentment. He lay in his chair between the columns of the
veranda, watching the birds and the squirrels and the bright
butterflies in the sunlight; he could see the fishing-boats drawn
up on the sand by the river’s mouth and men bathing their
oxen and horses ; or he looked over the garden, past the banyan-
tree, to the banana grove and the coco-nut palms. He was
touched by the solicitude of the Mohammedans of Ceylon and
of the exiles, especially Arabi who took from his arm where he

I 8 g 3 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 18 %

habitually wore it and placed upon Blunt’s a little leather bag
containing a charm to cure him. The Mohammedans gave
him a dinner and before he left they came in a body to see him
and he preached them ‘a sort of sermon’. Later reflecting as
he was apt to do on what might have been, he thought that had
he felt himself really at the point of death in Ceylon he would
have made profession of Islam, and perhaps attained to lasting
honour in Mohammedan regard, so great was the devotion of
all the community towards him.

Although he had convinced himself intellectually that as a
result of man’s obstinately exaggerated notion of his own
importance in the universe, all religions were equally in error,
he was not reconciled to his own loss of belief. His sympathy
continued to be with the cause of religion. He had been
tempted in x 8 8 1 to adopt the beliefs of the Egyptians with
whose struggle for a political and religious reformation he was
so closely connected and ‘more than once in the succeeding
years’, he said, ‘I have been very near to making the required
profession, but somehow the incredulity of my reason has
always at the last moment proved too strong, and I have been
unable to pronounce publicly words to which my intellect
could not wholly subscribe. It was in one of these moods of
religious attraction that I embarked upon my new project of
the Indian journey’.

It is not surprising, therefore, that his interest in India lay
in a great measure in the position of Indian Moslems as a living
force in Islam. He had not ceased to believe in the possibility
of a liberal Mohammedan reformation. If for the moment it
had been scotched in Egypt, it might still spring up in India
and spread from there.

Nor is it astonishing that with this interest was combined
a desire to study the political condition of all Indian natives
under foreign rule. The relations of the Governor of Ceylon,
Sir Arthur Gordon, with the native community of the island
were a revelation to Blunt of what friendly terms could exist
between foreign governor and native governed. But he

182

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1883-1884

shrewdly suspected that he would find few such relationships
in India. To discover whether or not the British administra-
tion was ruining India, and vitiating the power of its Moham-
medan inhabitants as he thought likely, was the twofold object
of his journey.

2

News of the Blunts’ arrival had been heralded by the
Mohammedans of Ceylon. When they landed in India, at
Tuticorn, on November 12th, most of the Moslem population
appeared to escort them to their hotel and, during their two
hours’ stay, to set before them the grievances and needs of the
Mohammedans of Southern India. This was what Blunt
wanted.

Jemal-ed-Din, whose talk during a London visit in the
spring of 1883 had suggested this Indian journey, had warned
him that it would be difficult to get in touch with native
opinion. On the contrary, partly because of letters of intro-
duction, including several from the Colombo natives and
Egyptian exiles and Jemal-ed-Din himself, he found the natives
anxious to discuss the situation and, usually, trustful of his
friendship. He learned, to be sure, that the Viceroy, Lord
Ripon, had been warned not to allow him to land since his
purpose, it was alleged, was to stir up sedition. In England
he was ‘credited with having gone to India with the intention
of overthrowing English supremacy and establishing Moham-
medan rule and rapine through the Peninsula’. ‘So,’ Lady
Gregory wrote to him, ‘I think you still have a chance of Tower
Hill!’ And an Anglo-Indian journal, 3 the Pioneer , with which
Sir Auckland Colvin, who had returned to the Indian Civil
Service, was connected, denounced him, saying that, as he had
egged on revolution in Egypt, so he would encourage it in
India.

The Viceroy, however, seemed to ignore the warning; and

1883-1884 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 183

the adverse criticism of the Pioneer acted as a recommendation
to discontented natives. To Moslems, particularly, it was a
happy introduction, recalling, as it did, Blunt’s past efforts on
behalf of Islam. Knowledge of his part in the Egyptian events
of the last few years, though not always accurate, was wide-
spread in India; he was known as the writer of The Future of
Islam which had created considerable interest among Indian
Mohammedans and was, in 1884, being translated into Urdu
to gain it still wider influence; and the publication of his
Colombo and Indian speeches in The Times and in Abu Nadara
— a journal edited in Paris by Blunt’s friend, James Sanua, an
exiled sympathizer with Egyptian Nationalists — and in Indian
journals, helped to spread his fame.

Still more useful to him was his quick understanding of
native grievances. His sympathy with Islam gave him an
insight into the Moslem point of view and his knowledge of
the Egyptian fellah illuminated his dealings with the Indian
ryot. Egypt had taught him how to extract information and
to weigh its significance. Experience of the intrigues of
Egyptian politics helped him — especially at Hyderabad — to
unravel the tangle of Indian politics. He had learned to trust
completely neither natives nor officials. It might be said, of
course, that he could not learn the truth in India because he
did not understand the various vernaculars; and he might be
suspected of wanting to be told the worst. In reality he did his
best to guard against false information by taking a local inter-
preter in each place who could not have been warned by the
interpreter of the preceding place what answer to give.

To the natives the sincerity of Blunt’s goodwill and the
seriousness of his attempt to help them was soon made clear.
When thirty-odd highly respectable Mohammedan gentlemen
who had come to the Patna station to bid him farewell were
insulted by an English army doctor, Blunt not only defended
them on the spot, but carried the matter to headquarters and
persevered until an apology to the Patna worthies was forth-
coming. Finding the Government of Hyderabad at the mercy

184 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1883-1884

of official and non-official intrigues, he laid the situation before
Lord Ripon and managed by dint of constant pressure to have
it straightened out. Recognizing their want of education he
not only urged Mohammedans to make every effort to obtain
it but himself set on foot a scheme for a Mohammedan
university to be founded at Hyderabad, drew up a plan, started
a subscription, and in every quarter forwarded publicity in
its favour.

These virtuous activities were hardly welcomed by British
officials. In their attitude toward him may be discerned some-
thing of the uneasy but long-suffering forbearance of much
tried elderly relations or old friends. For him the perturbation
created by his Indian journey was not the least of its pleasures.
There is no doubt that seriously as he took his work for the
Indians, he also enjoyed the power that he wielded for its own
sake. Without much faith in the courage or persistence in
active reform of the natives left to themselves, it was a satis-
faction to him to have them take counsel with him and to feel
himself necessary to the completion of their plans.

The Blunts’ journey was a sort of royal progress. The first
day at Tuticorn proved an augury to be trusted. Everywhere
they stopped, sometimes at towns where they merely halted in
the train, they were greeted by a body of notables anxious to
read them an address of welcome. Departing, they left on the
station platform, frequently, a group of Mohammedan gentle-
men endeavouring manfully to shout a hip-hip-hooray of
farewell. Everywhere they listened to speeches in their honour
and in return delivered exhortations. Everywhere they were
f£ted and dined. Gifts were sometimes sent them, but these
they returned, except small ones that bound them to no
obligation. In accepting thirty ‘cups of sweetness’ — thirty
dishes of whipped cream — Lady Anne enchanted the sender
by writing in Arabic ‘the sweetness of your gifts delights us,
but we are grieved at the absence of the giver’. The court
poet of Hyderabad, self-styled ‘the Bulbul of the Deccan’,
wrote complimentary verses to them. There was much diffi-

1883-1884 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 185

culty in explaining to the Mohammedans of Madura that the
Blunts were not relations of Her Majesty the Queen.

They saw not only the well-known sights that all tourists see
in India, but they had intimate glimpses of various strata of
Indian life and their unremitting energy enabled them to get
a very fair view of a cross-section upon which to base their
judgments. At Lucknow they looked out over the ruins left
by the Indian Mutiny with their host, the Rajah Emir Husseyn,
the only survivor in his family of British retribution after the
Mutiny; at Benares, where they were guests of the Maharajah,
they visited the last of the Moguls, a ‘sad old relic perched in
a half-ruinous house, like a sick eagle, looking down on the
river and the crescent-shaped city, with his little group of
tattered servants’. At Hyderabad they stayed with the British
Resident, the Mulvi Sami Ullah was their host at Aligarh,
the English railway superintendent at Bellari. One evening
they dined with the richest and most important Mohammedans
of Calcutta, the next, with Mohammed Said and a party of poor
students. Indian reformers of note such a Malabari the Parsee,
at Bombay, and Seyd Ahmed, the founder of Aligargh College,
and the Brahmin Ragunath Rao at Madras; and many indivi-
duals of no public importance who had part in the Government,
or in professions or trade, in the towns; and, in the villages,
peasants and land-owners, discussed the situation with them.
They took part in functions at native courts and in British
Government functions. The first meetings of the National
Conference at Calcutta during the last days of December, 1883,
were perhaps the most important gatherings at which Blunt
was present, because of the effect of their repetition in after
years on the development of the Indian situation. 4

As three parts of the one thousand delegates to the Con-
ference were from Bengal its first meetings were somewhat
provincial. But they seemed to Blunt creditable since two of
the speakers, Bannerji and Bose, were brilliant, the others
sensible and moderate. He himself refused to speak at the first
meeting, although he sympathized with the attack made in it

1 86 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1883-1884

on the Covenanted Civil Service ; at the second, he made a short
address in which he said that he believed '’all nations were fit
for self-government’, and, contrasting India with Greece when
it was first set to manage its own affairs, ‘few more so than the
Indian’. The National fund was discussed at the last meeting
and a considerable sum, to which Blunt contributed one
hundred rupees, subscribed to it. In a short speech he advised
the conference as to practical measures to be taken; and after
another Englishman, Seymour Keay, 5 an Anglo-Indian sym-
pathetic with native grievances, who came in late, had delivered
an address on rural distress, he spoke again giving his ‘ideas
on what might be looked forward to — first, elections to the
legislative council, secondly, representation in the English
Parliament, and thirdly, home Parliaments of their own in the
different provinces on the Colonial System’. A vote of thanks
was given to the two Englishmen present — ‘and so ended the
first session of the Indian Parliament. May it be memorable
in history’.

In four months’ time the whole of India could hardly be
studied exhaustively. The travellers worked their way north-
ward through Southern Madras and the famine districts of the
Presidency to the native Mohammedan state of Hyderabad,
where Blunt embroiled himself in the Government intrigues
and, he thought, got to the bottom of, and ultimately check-
mated, the machinations of the Calcutta Foreign Office ; thence
to Bombay, eastward to Calcutta, and back from there to the
United Provinces and Delhi. There was time merely for a
flying trip through part of the Rajputana principalities. The
Blunts returned to Hyderabad for the installation of the Nizam
before going to Bombay again for the last fortnight before sail-
ing. In these areas little escaped their observation : the mental
attitude of the inhabitants and their physical well-being; the
political and economic situation; the great studs of Arab
horses; 6 the very trees and birds and butterflies, and the
‘astonishing tiger’ in the zoo at Bombay.

In 1907 he wrote of the Indian tour as ‘the most interesting

1883-1884 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 187

four months perhaps of my political life — I may say, also the
most successful, for I had achieved all and more than all that
I set out to accomplish. The knowledge I had sought of the
condition of the natives under our rule, and especially of the
Mohammedan community, had been acquired with a fulness
I did not expect, and, what was certainly beyond all my hopes,
I had gained an influence in native India such as few English-
men have found themselves possessed of, even at the end of a
lifetime spent in the country’. Undoubtedly the Indian travels
had been well timed. They were made under circumstances of
exceptional interest and at an exceptional moment, when later
events were distinctly foreshadowed and solutions of problems
later put into effect were suggested.

Hope of reform had been aroused in the native mind by
Gladstone’s reversal of his predecessor’s policy of imperial
expansion and by the arrival of the new Viceroy, Lord Ripon
in 1880. 7 Three years later, when Blunt arrived, hope had
given way to scepticism : Gladstone’s Midlothian precepts had
been belied by the Egyptian war of 1882 and the certainty had
grown among Indian natives that the Government in England
would no longer give Lord Ripon the support necessary to
make headway in reform against the conservative opposition
of the Anglo-Indian official world. But the moment of belief
in the possibility of reform had done its work. It had aroused
educated natives to serious thought on the best ways of righting
their wrongs. Educated native India had come alive and was
agitating; it welcomed the presence of one who encouraged it.

The ideas that Blunt propounded while in India were not
at all revolutionary. That is evident on reading his public
speeches and also from the fact that he was given the coun-
tenance of the Imperial authorities. His actions were seditious
only to the degree that any encouragement given to native
politics is so. He encouraged peaceful agitation for just
demands because the demands already existed but needed
support to be seriously considered ; if they failed to command
attention, strife would result. Blunt still could not believe that

i88 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884

the British Government, once it heard the demands, would fail
to recognize their justice and act upon them if only for
expediency’s sake.

Later, seeing his work undone — even the one great practical
measure, the foundation of a Mohammedan university at
Hyderabad, fell through — he wondered at himself for not
returning and protecting his schemes. ‘I often look back,’ he
wrote in 1907, ‘at the great position I then held with Hindus,
Mohammedans, and Parsees, with a feeling of wonder and also
of regret that in the sequel I should have put it to so little
purpose. If I had had the perseverance to pursue the course I
had begun, and had followed it out unflinchingly to its full
results, I believe that I might have brought about a great
permanent good for the people whose interests I had espoused,
and perhaps with the Mohammedans encouraged them to a
real reformation, social and intellectual, if not political’. But
he had neither enough self-discipline to give up his whole
life to work towards a single end nor enough ‘faith in things
unseen’ to devote himself to a cause that was more than half
religious.

3

Short of going back to India, he did what he could on his
return to England for its natives. He published his conclusions
as to the state of the country in four articles in the Fortnightly
Review that came out during the height of the Anglo-Indian
agitation against Lord Ripon. The Anglo-Indian Press seized
upon them with acrimony. Lady Gregory, herself full of
enthusiasm for the Fortnightly articles, reported that an Anglo-
Indian of Madras had remarked to her, ‘I hate Mr. Blunt’,
and another non-Indian sympathizer said, ‘I am glad the Blunts
are happy. People that create a great deal of mischief generally
are. May the Lord give them what they deserve’ — to which
Lady Gregory quickly replied, ‘Amen’.

1884 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 189

But there were cooler Anglo-Indian critics, such as Blunt’s
friend Sir Alfred Lyall, at that time Governor of the North-
West Provinces, who while regretting that ‘the force and
benefit’ of Blunt’s articles should have been diminished ‘by
incautious use of unverified information’ and by a too evidently
partial attitude, admitted that there was truth in much that
Blunt wrote. The native press of course was whole-hearted in
approval. ‘In the defence, as in the attack,’ Blunt recognized
‘the highest tribute which could be paid to their merit as an
accurate representation of native griefs and native aspirations.’
As such, and because the Indian question seemed to him the
most important that Englishmen of that generation would have
to solve, he collected and published them in 1885 in a volume
under the title, Ideas About India.

In the four preliminary chapters he discussed the difficulties
in which the British Government in India had involved itself
under the headings of agricultural danger, race hatred,
awakened effort on the part of the Mohammedan population
towards its own advancement, and — taking as example the
native state of Hyderabad, with the government of which he
was now intimately acquainted — the aggressive policy of the
Calcutta Foreign Office towards native states. The final chapter
is entitled ‘The Future of Self-Government’. In it he sum-
marized the advantages and disadvantages to India — and so to
England — of its system of Government of 1884— 8 5 and stated
fully the immediate reforms demanded by the natives. He
himself would like to see ‘each province of India entirely self-
managed as regards all civil matters, raising its own revenue
in its own way, providing for its own needs of internal order,
public works, and administration of all kinds, and controlled
by the constant supervision of its own provincial assembly’.
But, ‘as long as India remains under the protection of England,
certain charges on the revenue and certain executive and legis-
lative functions would have to remain Imperial’.

Nowhere in the book did Blunt advocate a break between
India and England: ‘The supreme Imperial Government,’ he

190

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1884

wrote, ‘all wish to preserve. . . . An Imperial Government and
an Imperial Army will remain a necessity for India.’ Nor did
he belittle the good that England had done in India. He had
found much of which to be proud as an Englishman. What
had seemed to him most hopeful in India were its intellectual
and religious aspects under English rule, and ‘I am glad’, he
wrote, ‘to think that they could hardly have been witnessed
under any other domination than our own’. The purpose of
his book was the salutary one of fostering needed reforms in
time to preserve that domination in peace and amity.

England has now granted most of the Indian reforms which
Blunt advocated, but they have been wrung from her after
many years of strife and have bred all the bitterness which he
wished to avoid. His voice was prophetic when he warned
England that the Indian native ‘might without actual revolt
make all government impossible. We have had’, he said, ‘a
foretaste of what passive obstruction can do in Egypt, and the
art may well spread to India’. He has been justified also in his
prediction that if England did not support the Mohammedans
in their desire for advancement, particularly in education, the
Hindu population with their greater enterprise would swamp
the Moslems, creating a new and virulent problem.

Until 1907, Blunt did not publish the whole history of his
Indian travels, and then only privately in the second part of
his ‘Secret History Series’, a volume in which he included also
an account of his activities throughout 1884 to November,
1885. Like the first volume of the series, it is written chiefly
in diary form, and possesses the freshness of all good diaries
and the spice of good gossip. It abounds, as do all his journals,
in clever thumbnail sketches and amusing sidelights ; more often
than his other narratives it has pages of delightful description
of the country and the palaces and temples which, being ‘still
the home of a living worship’, interested him as those of Egypt
and Greece did not.

Blunt’s ethics in using confidential information are some-
times impugned. He is charged, particularly in connection

1884 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 191

with his writings about India, with using information that had
come to him in private conversation — with Lord Lytton during
his first visit to India in 1880, or with other friends at other
times. He could not resist supporting his opinions by whatever
came to hand. He argued perhaps justly, that, since officials
took care to publish everything that would back up their point
of view, it was only fair that information on the other side
should be made public, and much of this information was
carefully guarded except in private conversation.

The unnecessary gossip and harsh, trivial judgments that
are included in his privately printed diaries need not be
defended since they were expunged from the public version.
They bear witness to the less amiable side of his character: his
interest in petty and even malicious gossip; his quick, often
ill-considered judgments — his voracious appetite, in short, for
mental as well as physical stimulus. The later expurgated
book, published in 1909 and entitled India Under Rif on, is
made up of the first half of the private volume which deals
with India and of Ideas about India , except for the chapter
on ‘Native States’, the matter of which is contained in the
diary itself. Together they form a comprehensive account
of the Indian journey: the diary is invaluable in giving the
political conclusions a background that makes them vivid
and convincing, and the essays add point to the personal
experience.

4

When he arrived in England after the Indian journey, Blunt
unexpectedly found himself high in favour. The political
world, fairly generally, now admitted that he had been right
about Egypt in 1882 and that the British Government would
have done far better to avoid war and to work with, rather than
against, Arabi. And yet many of the very men who professed
regret for the war seemed intent upon bringing on a new one

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

192

1884

by forcing England to intervene in the Egyptian— Soudan
imbroglio. Blunt’s discouragement was profound.

He had suspected that a recrudescence of the same old
policy would occur when, in January, while still in India,
he had heard of General Gordon’s mission to Khartoum. 8 Blunt
himself both liked and admired Gordon with whom he had
had some sympathetic talk and correspondence about both
India and Egypt; but the Government, he thought, looked
upon Gordon as mad, and, except for unavowed — and un-
avowable — motives would be unlikely to choose him as its
emissary. 9 Blunt had little faith in Governmental ulterior
motives. The mission seemed to him to be, probably, a new
imperialistic move toward aggrandizement.

Concerning the Mahdi he had much information from the
Mohammedan point of view that was lacking in England and a
more just idea of his power than existed there. On his way to
India he had found sympathy with the Mahdists fairly wide-
spread and had wondered at Sir Evelyn Baring’s apparent
unawareness of the threatening aspect of the Soudanese horizon.
In India he found that the leading Mohammedans were watch-
ing the Mahdi’s movements with keen interest. Persians and
Arabs from Yemen told him that should the Mahdi succeed in
winning his way across the Red Sea, all Mohammedans would
rise to his support, preferring him to the English. Blunt, there-
fore, realized that wide complications were bound to follow
opposition to the Mahdi’s movement, and that however
peaceful Gordon’s intentions might be. In any case he would
inevitably be pushed into hostility if only because he believed
— as Blunt knew he did — that the retention of Khartoum was
necessary to Egypt, Alarmed, he sent a letter of warning to
the General:

Delhi, January 24th, 1884.

My dear General,

I feel obliged to write to you about your mission to the
Soudan. I see it announced to-day by telegraph, without

1884- CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 193

explanation of its object, but I cannot wait till more definite
news arrives, and I desire to warn you. It may be you are
going there to make peace between the Mahdi and our
troops in Egypt, to acknowledge his sovereignty in the
Soudan, and arrange terms for the evacuation of Khartoum.
If so, I can only wish you Godspeed. It is a good work, and
you will accomplish it. But if, as I fear it may be, from the
tradition of those in power, the object of your mission is to
divide the tribes with a view to retaining any part of the
country for the Khedive, to raise men for him and scatter
money, it is bad work, and you will fail. Itmustbe so. Neither
your courage nor your honest purpose, nor the inspiration
which has hitherto guided you, will bring you success. I
know enough to be able to assure you that every honest
Mohammedan in Egypt and North Africa and Arabia
sympathizes with the Mahdi ’s cause, not necessarily believ-
ing him to have a divine mission, but as representing ideas
of liberty and justice, and religious government, which they
acknowledge to be divine. For this reason you will only
have the men of Belial on your side, and these will betray
you.

I beg you to be cautious. Do not trust to the old sym-
pathy which united Englishmen with the Arabs. I fear it is
a thing of the past, and that even your great name will not
protect you with them. Also consider what your death will
mean; the certainty of a cry for vengeance in England and
an excuse with those who ask no better than a war of
conquest. I wish I could be sure that all those who are
sending you on your mission do not foresee this end.

Forgive me if I am wrong in my fears ; and believe me
yours, very gratefully in memory of last year.

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

Whether Gordon ever received this letter is not known.
In any case before he reached Egypt he had abandoned his
first idea of going to the Mahdi to negotiate some sort of truce

N

i 9 4 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884-1885

during the peaceful departure of the Egyptian garrisons. He
had determined to rely upon his own prestige among the
tribes and the announcement of England’s peaceful intentions
to win support sufficient to withstand the Mahdi. Such a
policy was based, evidently, upon a failure to recognize
Mohammed Ahmed’s strength or the significance of his
movement and was destined, as Blunt foresaw, to failure unless
strongly backed by military force.

The history of the mission, its purpose, Gordon’s orders
and intentions only very recently have been set forth accur-
ately. 10 During the years 1884—85 they were misunder-
stood even by those who had first-hand information. News
reached England from Khartoum in such higgledy-piggledy
fashion that almost no one could form a true idea of what was
really going on in the Soudan. In common with most liberal-
minded men, Blunt began to feel with the Government that
Gordon was mad. This feeling became a conviction as the
year progressed. Harsh as it was, it seemed the most charit-
able interpretation possible. Blunt did not learn how mistaken
it was until many years had passed.

His later change of attitude toward Gordon, and the
reasons for it, he recorded with the diary of events of 1884—
85 that he published twenty-seven years later in Gordon at
Khartoum. But, for the sake of presenting a true picture, he
retained there the passages from the diary that gave his old
opinion. However interesting the records of early mistaken
judgments and ill-founded prophecies make the book as a
human document — rage sometimes lends a book life — they
provide critics with admirable examples of Blunt’s ‘folly’ and
‘exaggerated words’. None the less his opinions were based
on just deductions from the information at hand, and their
presence in the book, if foolhardy, is the result of deliberate
honesty.

Blunt’s suspicions of the justice of his earlier attitude had
been aroused by what seemed to him the extravagant attack
on Gordon made by Lord Cromer in Modern Egypt in 1907,

1884-1885 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 195

and, on re-examining all the available evidence, he had
discovered that ‘the prime responsibility of the mission as
necessarily one of war was . . . that of those who sent’ General
Gordon, and the final failure of the mission was owing to
Lord Cromer himself. Given Gordon’s character — that of a
‘Christian knight errant, seeking service where there were
dragons of iniquity to fight, or distressed persons to be rescued
by feats of arms’ — plus the obvious inherent difficulties of the
situation, it seemed to Blunt to have been either criminal
stupidity or craft on the part of the Government to assume
that the mission could be successful.

His mistrust of Lord Cromer, on whom, he thought, the
responsibility for the Government’s action largely rested, led
him into such violence of language and tone as to cast a suspi-
cion on the justice of his indictment. Even though Blunt saw
something of ‘the great proconsul’ in the ’nineties and was at
least on amicable terms with him then, he never felt con-
fidence in him. Inevitably, he detested Cromer’s political
methods, and his certainty that his exclusion from Egypt in
1884—85' was owing to Cromer’s resentment of his inter-
ference the year before with political prisoners at Cairo added
a personal prejudice against him that was increased by Cromer’s
references to him in Modern Egypt. Gordon at Khartoum is a
blast directed against Lord Cromer. But it both amply
vindicates Gordon and disposes in large part of the political
charges and aspersions cast upon Blunt in Modern Egypt . 11

In 1884—85, however, Blunt was interested neither in
opposing Lord Cromer nor in justifying Gordon. He was
absorbed in combating his own exclusion from Egypt 13 and
in working out an independent scheme to offset the harm that
was being done by Gordon’s mission. As early as April he
put forward a counter-proposal of means to bring peace to
the Soudan and Egypt: negotiation through an accredited
Government agent with the Mahdi himself. 13 At first Blunt
urged that Gordon be ordered to proceed with such direct
negotiation ; then, seeing that hopeless, he offered to undertake

i 9 6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884-1885

it himself. Sheykh Jemal-ed-Din on being questioned by
Blunt said that he, also, considered the dispatch of such a
commissioner not only right but feasible. In communication
himself with agents of the Mahdi, he offered to arrange for
the safe conduct to Mohammed Ahmed of Blunt or of any
accredited agent of the English Government of whom Blunt
approved. The Sheykh agreed with Blunt’s views in regard
to Egypt and the Soudan : the Soudan should be left to its native
tribes as it was of no use to Egypt, and the chief reason for its
retention, the problem of the Nile water, could be solved by
peaceful negotiation.

5

Very soon after opening his campaign for peace in his
usual way by a letter to Gladstone suggesting the dispatch
of an accredited agent to the Mahdi, Blunt saw that the
Government again would use him only as far as it could do so
without acknowledgment or recognition. ‘What they want,
evidently,’ he wrote, ‘is that I should take all the responsibility
of the negotiations on myself, and offer terms which they
might afterwards repudiate. But they won’t catch me again
doing this, and, if I go to Obeyd, I go as a British envoy.
Otherwise I should only be delayed by the Khedive on my
road.’

A leading article in the Pall Mall Gazette advocating his
ideas, Button’s cheering assertion that his arguments were
making a mark, the Prime Minister’s apparent personal
inclination toward peaceful methods, all encouraged him to
believe that the Government might be convinced. Unfor-
tunately the majority of Members of Parliament were deter-
mined upon sending troops to ‘rescue’ Gordon, and, in
Gordon’s words echoed by the editor Stead, to ‘smash the
Mahdi’. By judicious political play they forced the Prime
Minister’s hand. Blunt received a categorical reply to his

1884-1885 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 197

proposal: ‘Her Majesty’s Government could not make use
of my offer to act as mediator in the Soudan, inasmuch as it must
already be known throughout that region that they, in com-
mon with the Government of Egypt, have no other desire
than to promote the evacuation of the country — and the
restoration of its liberties.’

More letters flowed from Blunt’s pen. Letters from
Frederic Harrison and even John Morley supported him.
Blunt sent for Sheykh Mohammed Abdu to come to London,
thinking that his personal integrity and the facts at his com-
mand might convince members of the Government. But, on
the Sheykh’s arrival no interview could be arranged with
Gladstone and although he got on well with Lord Hartington
and Lord Randolph Churchill, others who were unused to
talking with Orientals and somewhat abrupt in manner gave
him a sense of insincerity or hostility. His visit had little
political effect and gave little pleasure to Blunt as he was
still very bitter against the English because of the Egyptian
war. One or two incidents, however, Blunt relates with the
sense of irony which never failed him. ‘From the terrace
[of the Houses of Parliament] we showed Abdu,’ he recorded,
‘the police boat cruising around to prevent dynamite attempts,
a sight which edified him, and we pointed out to him Mr.
Bright talking on a bench to Nathaniel Rothschild .’ 14

Determined to pull every wire possible, Blunt went with
Lady Anne, by way of Paris and a visit to the Potockis in
Poland, to Constantinople to try to persuade the Sultan to
throw his influence toward a new settlement in Egypt, and the
substitution for Tewfik of a Khedive who could rule Egypt
in friendly relation with the Mahdi. From the standpoint of
definite political results his visit was as signal a failure as
Mohammed Abdu’s to London.

The Sultan, shut up in Yildiz Kiosk and suspicious of any
new agent arriving on the scene, refused to give him an
interview, according him only a state visit to the Seraglio
and the Arab stud. But Blunt was never at a loss for ways

198 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884-1885

in which to fill his time. He reviewed the changes that had
come about in the city since his young diplomatic days there,
bemoaning the replacement of the shabby charming old
Turkish houses by new Europeanized villas; and he rode to
the at mai'dan where the Jews were keeping Sabbath in their
best clothes and some of them were catching goldfinches in a
net and he had the satisfaction of setting a bird free. He
talked politics over with every sort of person: with Turkish
Pashas, particularly old Achmet Vefyk Pasha, whose keen
intelligence and outspoken talk with its bursts of wit, made
him the most remarkable Turk and one of the most remarkable
men Blunt had ever met; with Prince Halim, the possible
future Khedive of Egypt, and with various refugees from that
country who greeted him as the Saviour of their lives; with
the Patriarch of Catholic Armenia; with Kurdish patriots —
there is no end to the list. The information gleaned from this
journey Blunt was to find useful years later when he came to
write the first of his ‘Secret History series’, but it showed
him that little was to be hoped from the Sultan in the present
Soudan Crisis.

On his return from Constantinople, as Button had been
putting it about during his absence that he was in constant
communication with the Mahdi, Blunt found that his words
carried greater weight than hitherto. He was in considerable
demand as a source of information, suffering the usual mis-
representation. 15 In his diary for December 23rd he noted:
‘In the morning Stead [editor of the Pall Mall Gazette] sent
me a proof of his interview to correct, a ridiculous thing which
I had to rewrite.’ To this he afterwards added, ‘The proof
was brought by an office boy, with a message that it was to
go to press in an hour, and it was a mere accident that I was
at home and able to stop it. It contained, among other extra-
vagances put into my mouth, that Egypt would be better
annexed than continue ill-governed as it was, an idea which,
if Stead’s, was certainly not mine. When I saw Stead later in
the day and expostulated with him about this, his answer was

i 884-1 885 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 199

characteristic: “Well,” he said, “if you did not say it, it is
just what you ought to have said.” ’

News of General Wolseley’s advance towards Khartoum,
of the battle of Abu Klea, and finally of General Steward’s
progress towards Metemneh, made it clear that no moves
towards negotiation were likely to impress the Government.
Blunt’s wrath knew no bounds. ‘Great God! What a stupid
dull beast this world is. It sends an army to fight against an
innocent people, and an innocent people destroy that army.
One would think that not a single M.P. from Mr. Gladstone
downwards had ever read a word of the history of Greece or
heard of Marathon. This stupidity is more hideous even than
their cruelty and lying. But if there is a God upon the earth,
He will this time do justice.’ All that he could do was to work
feverishly upon the Turkish Ambassador, a well-meaning but
muddled old gentleman, and upon Hobart Pasha, the Sultan’s
private envoy in London, to dissuade the Sultan from sending
help to Wolseley in the Sudan.

The shock of the fall of Khartoum 1 6 and of Gordon’s death
turned many, who had hitherto supported the sending of
troops into the Soudan, towards a more peaceful policy:
possibility of negotiations revived; applications came to Blunt
from numerous high quarters, usually indirectly, to inquire
about means of communication with the Mahdi; many official
suggestions were subjected to Blunt’s veto or approval;
numerous letters were written by him to The Times and huge
meetings at which he spoke were held not only in London
but in Birmingham and elsewhere. Bowles published a first-
rate caricature of him entitled ‘A Prophet’ by Ape in Vanity
Fair , along with a laudatory leading article by Jehu Junior.
But the Government refused to work through him openly or
to accept his suggestions ; nothing conclusive could be
accomplished.

At the end of the first week in May, news came of a fresh
victory of General Graham at Suakin, a victory that consisted,
it was reported, in surrounding a Bedouin camp in which

200

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884-1885

there were women and children and cattle as well as fighting
men and in firing the lot . 17 Blunt, stirred to white fury,
rushed to the House of Commons where he persuaded mem-
bers of all parties to protest. The upshot was that at question
time, Morley asked for an explanation and Hartington
promised a definite statement of military policy. On May 10th,
Hartington made his statement: Great Britain was to clear
out of the Soudan bag and baggage at the first rising of the
Nile; everything, including the proposed Berber railway and
excepting only Suakin, was to be abandoned until such a time
as the Government could make other arrangements with a
‘civilized power’.

Every one had been prepared for Governmental surrender;
but no one had dreamed that the surrender would be so
complete. Rejoicing and softened by success, Blunt sent
Gladstone congratulations on the abandonment of war and a
copy of the new edition of his Proteus sonnets. The Prime
Minister’s reply was equally amiable: he ‘would turn with
pleasure from the Soudan to Proteus’. With the complacency
of victory, Blunt remarked, ‘these little interchanges of
courtesy in war time are agreeable, and the old man appreciates
them, looking on all politics as he does in the light of a debating
club.’

A month later Blunt’s spirits soared higher: the Govern-
ment was defeated, astonishingly enough on the budget.
There was hope of Tory readjustment. Unhappily it soon
became apparent that Lord Salisbury, the new Tory Prime
Minister, would listen only to Wolseley and Baring. The
fight was on again. Again Blunt was drawn into the fray.
Lord Randolph Churchill urged him to talk to Sir Henry
Drummond Wolff who was being sent by the Government to
inquire into the situation at Constantinople and Cairo and
prepare a policy. Lord Randolph said, ‘You need not mind
putting yourself forward in this matter; you are an authority
on Egypt and have a right to be heard’. Through Blunt he
sounded out the possibility of Arabi’s return to Egypt as

1884-1885 CEYLON, INDIA AND THE SOUDAN 201

minister under Tewfik, and persuaded Blunt to arrange for
Sheykh Jemal-ed-Din to come to London to confer with
him.

The Sheykh, who had been living, exiled, in Paris where
Blunt had seen something of him during the last three years,
spent three months, ‘the full term of Arab hospitality’, at
Blunt’s house in James Street. The visit began propitiously
but resulted chiefly in much expense and distress for Blunt.
It ended with Jemal-el-Din’s departure in dudgeon. Blunt
had been obliged to ask two of the Sheykh’s Oriental friends,
who had created a great disturbance ‘by beating each other
over the heads with umbrellas in a quarrel about religion or
politics’, to leave the house — ‘one must draw the line some-
where’, he remarked.

Both Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Henry Drummond
Wolff were impressed favourably by the Sheykh’s manner and
arguments, and Wolff settled to communicate with Blunt
through Churchill if, as he thought possible, he should find
the Sheykh’s help necessary to profitable negotiations. Blunt,
then, at his own expense, was to send Jemal-ed-Din out to
Constantinople. Wolff’s final refusal, after several contra-
dictory wires, to summon the Sheykh and rely on his advice
was the prime reason, Blunt thought, for the failure of his
mission.

There appeared to be nothing more that Blunt could do
to further the cause of Egyptian liberty and, though what he
had done seemed of little avail, he turned undaunted to a new
field — Ireland — to which he was to devote himself for some
years. And feeling the need of strengthening his influence he
became engaged for the first time in election campaigns.
Towards the end of the year came the Burmese war, more
unnecessary bloodshed to goad him for the last time that year
into passionate opposition and letters to The Times : ‘This
Burmese war,’ he wrote, ‘is a piece with all these wars: hungry
commercial speculators making contracts with a dishonest
prince, European intrigues, British remonstrances, official

202 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1884-1885

interference, threates from Calcutta, appeal of the Prince to
his people, who strangely take his side in the quarrel, ulti-
matum issued, arrival of fleet, massacre of Europeans, bom-
bardment, slaughter of natives, triumph of British arms,
annexation of territory, pay, prize money, pensions, peerages
all round, and so da capo.'

CHAPTER X

HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

i

Preoccupied as Blunt was with politics during 1884-85 he
kept up with his friends and was on happy terms even with
those who differed radically from him in political opinion —
with Lytton, Auberon Herbert, and friends who attended the
annual lawn tennis tournament at Crabbet, and many others.
Towards people in general —

‘The human cattle grazing as they go,

Unheedful of the heavens’ —

he was tolerant as long as they did not importune him. Willing
to listen to any point of view not born of stupidity, or to any
gossip spiced with wit, first-rate talk on whatever subject
delighted him. His attitude is touched off in the note recorded
in his diary after a week-end spent at Brocket: ‘Of all the
people in the world I like Henry Cowper best as companion.
He represents Whig tradition in its most attractive form, that
of a cultured politician of a hundred years ago — partly humane,
partly sceptical, full of dignity, and profoundly immoral.’

Socially as well as politically Blunt held a trump card in the
Crabbet Arab stud. Soon after it was founded it began to
draw interested inspection and prospective buyers from all
over the world and, for many years following 1880, it was
popularized by a great midsummer sale at Crabbet of mares
and horses which they planned to replace by importing others.
As time went on the sales proved successful financially. And
they became gay fites champetres where everyone who was
anyone was likely to be seen. Attendance had to be limited

203

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

204

1884-1885

by cards that were much sought after; a special train ran
down from London to Three Bridges, the station for Crabbet;
The Times devoted a full column — the rest of the Press perhaps
more — to reporting the event.

That day of glory had not dawned in 1884 but the stud had
already proved itself successful. There were from thirty to
forty horses in the, Crabbet stables at only £$00 yearly loss,
little more than Blunt’s stable bill in former years. Not an
animal had died nor had there been any serious illness among
the imported horses; among those foaled in England there
had been losses in their first year — the first year weathered,
there was no more difficulty. Moreover, Blunt wrote, ‘in pure
Arabian breeding," while the stock is almost uniformly good,
there are every year delightful surprises, which give an element
of unbounded hope to the breeder. Every now and then a
colt appears, recalling like a vision the shape and beauty of
horses figured in old prints and books of the last century; the
Godolphin, the Bloody-Shouldered, the Darley Arabian, stand
before you ; and beyond even these you seem to see an outline
of the ideal horse which is the object of your dreams. On these
you build a fabric of expectation; and as they improve each
day, and grow beneath your eyes, you feel that you have at
last that ideal in your grasp, whose chase alone brings happi-
ness.’

Blunt upheld his sporting prestige — and enjoyed himself —
by hunting frequently with the Leconfield and other hounds,
and pinned his hope to winning the promised Newmarket
Arab race. Mrs. Howard told him that ‘Freddy Leveson had
asked Rosebery the other day why he continued on the turf
and he had answered because it was the easiest way in England
to be accepted as a Statesman, and he had appealed to Glad-
stone, who quite agreed with him.’ Blunt likewise agreed.
‘If we win the Arab race at Newmarket,’ he wrote, ‘it will do
more for my ideas than half a dozen victories for the Mahdi.’

No horse imported from Arabia, he realized, could hope to
win against English thoroughbreds. But the young stock of

1884-1885 HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING 205

his own stud bred in conditions more favourable than those
of the desert were taller, more lengthy, and deeper in girth
than their sires and dams and had not fallen off in bone.
This increase of size he believed would be accompanied to a
great extent by increase of speed. He staked the fortunes of
the stud on a beautiful three-year-old chestnut filly Haifa.
She had been tried more than once against English thorough-
breds with results that made her winning against horses of
her own Arab class seem a certainty. For second string to his
bow and to make running for Haifa at the Newmarket race
he entered Rataplan, winner of good races in India. As most
promising competitor they had Dictator, a horse which they
had persuaded an Arab dealer in Bombay to send over with
others for the race.

The Blunts arrived at Newmarket on July 2nd, 1884, in
fine fettle, sure of victory. ‘All the world and his wife’ crowded
the course, and ‘quite a mob’ watched the Arabs stripped. The
horses started on their canter and the Blunts saw them coming
in a cluster at a tremendous pace on the hill, beyond the fir-
trees. Complacently excited, they trotted back towards the
paddock. Then to their utter dismay, they saw what seemed
to be the Indian horses going on alone. Admiral Tryon’s
Asil won the race, Dictator second and Rataplan, who had
been making the running for Haifa third. Haifa was not even
in the running.

Blunt’s disappointment was abysmal. He feared that the
Jockey Club would not have the courage to repeat the race.
When the winner, Asil, was ‘handsomely beaten’ a short time
later by an inferior English thoroughbred, his fears were
realized. The Press had thought the race childish. Blunt,
moreover, was obliged to admit that the horses that had run
best were precisely those showing least of the Arab type, and
he was even thankful to have learned so early in the game that
it would take more patience and money than he was prepared
to give to breed Arabs for the turf. But he was chagrined
by the political set-back which the defeat had administered.

206 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1885

That he understood fairly accurately the instability of his
political position is evident from certain anecdotes that he
recounted with gusto in his diary for 18 85. He had a dis-
cussion with two friends, political opponents, about the
advantage of truth-telling in politics. ‘They would neither of
them hear of it; but I said, “Look at me, if I had not made
it a rule to speak the exact truth and have no secrets where
should I be to-day? I have been engaged for the last four
years in every kind of intrigue and yet my name stands clear.”
They laughed at this.’ He learned that Gladstone at this time
thought him ‘a charming person but on politics mad’. Some-
what earlier he had recorded in his diary: ‘Goschen says I am
an imprudent person who, if you tell anything to him, and he
has a reason to be dissatisfied with you afterwards, repeats
what you tell him.’ Irritated by his whole-hearted defence of
the Mahdi, one of his friends begged him ‘not to talk in that
way in England’. ‘She said, “It is so stupid of you, because
you have so much sense, and if you would be moderate, you
might have great influence.” I said: “My influence will never
be great in England because English people care nothing for
principle and everything for party, and I am not a party man.
My influence lies in the East, where all understand and
accept me.” ’

He was conscious that his ‘somewhat romantic view of
politics’, as he termed it, could not appeal per se to hard-
headed politicians. Although his personal charm and energy
as well as the justice of his arguments swung many to his way
of thinking, and although the Government used him when they
saw fit, he had upheld too many unpopular causes, and causes
that had failed, for them to care to identify themselves publicly
with him. Party men could not afford to commit themselves
to unpopular policies unsanctioned by their party. Unofficial
wire pulling, furthermore, and letters to The Times , and
speeches to however worthy societies, become in time merely
a joke. It seemed increasingly clear to Blunt that he must
have some position of acknowledged public authority.

i 8 8 s

HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

207

2

Early in 1885 he began to think vaguely of entering
Parliament, but he could not decide with which party to
throw in his lot. By birth he was a Conservative, and such he
remained always in domestic politics. In foreign politics his
beliefs accorded with those of no one party. Conservatives
begged him to join Conservative ranks, Radicals besought
him to become a Radical, others made various other sug-
gestions. Despairing, he wrote, ‘I am like a donkey between
two bundles of hay — very like the donkey.’

By April he had concluded that his closest affinity probably
lay with Lord Randolph Churchill’s Fourth Party. ‘ “If you
will come forward as my supporter,” Lord Randolph said,
“you can’t do better, and I am asked almost every day to
recommend candidates.” I said,’ wrote Blunt, ‘ “What will
that bind me to? You know my foreign politics, but at home
I am a Catholic and a Tory as regards the land question and
education, and in Ireland I am a Nationalist.” He made a
face at the word “Nationalist”. He said: “You could not
come forward as an avowed ‘Nationalist’, but you need not
say much about that. If you say that you have wide opinions
on the Irish question it will be enough, and when you are once
in Parliament you can take your own line.” “But, what,” I
said, “is Tory Democracy? Tell me in two words, for I don’t
think I quite understand it.” He said: “That is a question
I am always in a fright lest someone should put it to me
publicly. To tell the truth I don’t know myself what Tory
Democracy is. But I believe it is principally opportunism.
But say you are a Tory Democrat, and that will do.” I said:
“You know me well enough to be sure that I would not be
paid to be in Parliament if I was not free to take my own line.
I had thought of standing as an Irish Home Ruler with
Parnell, but I was in doubt and thought I would consult you.”
He said; “You would lose your influence if you did this.

208 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1885

Parnell would require you to join in his policy of obstruction
and you would be discredited. You had better not commit
yourself to that, though you might vote with him on purely
Irish questions. But you should write out a programme of
your ideas, and I will see if there is a constituency that will
accept them.” I said: “I will think it over and let you know.”
. . . I think perhaps after all,’ Blunt added, ‘I shall be freest
with Randolph; and certainly his conversation to-day binds
me to nothing .’ 1

Parnell urged him to get Lord Randolph to nominate him
where there were Irish constituents, promising him the solid
Irish vote. That settled it. He cast in his lot with the Tory
Democrats. To make his position absolutely clear, he fol-
lowed Lord Randolph’s suggestion of drawing up a manifesto,
entitled ‘Am I a Tory Democrat?’ in which he outlined his
programme. Churchill approved it, boggling only at the term
‘Home Rule’, and authorized him to tell the Conservative
agent, Middleton, that he would be of great value to the
Conservative party. The manifesto, published as a letter in
The Times , had considerable success : Skittles reported that the
Prince of Wales wrote that he was ‘really so pleased with it,
and it is a real good letter’.

Middleton, with some difficulty, found a constituency
willing to accept a Roman Catholic candidate advocating
Irish Home Rule and interested chiefly in foreign politics.®
On the morning of the electoral address, Blunt discovered
that Churchill had failed to send his promised supporting
letter and that two new Conservative candidates had been
started. All the same Camberwell selected him as Conservative
candidate.

His chief local supporters, he discovered, were men of no
position, character or intelligence, the chairman of his com-
mittee being a sweating tailor. Camberwell was a new con-
stituency created by the redistribution bill and politically
chaotic. Organization had to be created and voters educated.
There was, of course, little prejudice to be overcome; the

HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

1885

209

difficulty lay in persuading voters to take any interest whatever
in politics. The most successful meeting held during the
canvass for Blunt was one at which the speakers addressed
their uncomprehending but enthusiastic audience in Arabic
and Persian.

Blunt found electioneering ‘a terrible come-down after
politics of the golden East, or even of an Arab tribe’ — speaking
to ‘one hundred frowsy fellows in a stuffy schoolroom talking
nonsense about what they know or care nothing about’, or
mounted on a wagon in the street where nothing much short
of pure socialism was listened to. To make an adequate
impression, he said, it was necessary for a lord to address the
meetings in the candidate’s support. After explaining the
intrigues that had brought on the Egyptian war to three
thousand people on October nth at Newcastle, where he had
been asked to give the inaugural address at the Tyneside
lectures, he was constrained to moan, ‘What a difference
between these North Country men and the miserable Camber-
well rabble! I am ashamed of my late electioneering; it is a
degrading business.’

Possibly because of his scorn of the Camberwell electors,
and even more because he would neither couch his decided
views in vague and politic terms nor curb his wit, his efforts
failed. Later on when someone spoke strongly to him against
Lord Randolph, he remarked that his ‘experience of politicians
was that the only honest ones were those who had no prin-
ciples’. Such observations as this, however just, were too
clever to give electors confidence — indeed they were partly
responsible for all Blunt’s political failures.

At the end of September a great Tory demonstration was
held at Crabbet in a large tent in the Park. On November
1 2th he saw Churchill for what proved to be their last talk
on an intimate footing as political allies. The following day
Blunt declared for Home Rule in its full sense, avowing his
intention of supporting Parnell in his demand for an Irish
Parliament. ‘I felt bound to do this,’ he wrote later, ‘but I

210

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1885

believe it cost me my election.’ The policy was too complete
not to frighten his constituents. Two weeks more and the
struggle was over. ‘All the last fortnight was occupied in
heavy work,’ he said, ‘of which my wife, with her maid
Cowie, took the lion’s share, and I was helped by many per-
sonal friends from outside. But their devoted labours proved
of no avail, and I lost the election by 162 votes out of 6,1 12
votes polled.’

For one reason in particular Blunt never ceased to regret
this defeat: it left Lord Randolph Churchill, at that time
the coming man in English politics, ‘without any adviser in
the ways of political virtue’. Had Blunt obtained a seat in
the House of Commons he would, he thought, certainly have
become one of Lord Randolph’s most trusted lieutenants and
might have prevented him from making the mistakes which
eventually caused his downfall. He felt that he exercised over
Churchill ‘a very considerable influence’, and might even have
held him faithful to Irish Home Rule. Together they might
have persuaded Lord Salisbury to adopt it as the Tory policy.

Two years of intermittent effort to obtain a seat followed
the Camberwell defeat. Over twenty constituencies sounded
him out, and eleven sent him formal invitations to become
their candidate. Of these he accepted two, Kidderminster
and Deptford. With the Camberwell electors he did not break
for a month after his defeat. Churchill advised Blunt’s going
on with him; the Camberwell electors themselves besought
him to renew his campaign; with no great enthusiasm Blunt
consented. When Gladstone’s new programme of Home Rule,
published by his son, appeared on December 8th, however, it
became amply clear that the place for supporters of Ireland
was no longer in Tory ranks. By Christmas Blunt had decided
definitely to retire from the Camberwell candidature. Even
Churchill agreed that if he wanted Home Rule he must go
to Mr. Gladstone.

The break left Blunt dispirited: ‘Ambition is a poisonous
thing, mere gambling; and this is the morning after’. His

211

1885-1886 HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

position was anomalous. It seemed to him unlikely that the
Liberals, and Gladstone in particular, would forgive his
alliance with Churchill. On the issue of the moment, Irish
Home Rule, his sympathies were entirely Liberal; otherwise
they were as they had been, Conservative. When he said he
was a Liberal people were inclined, he thought, to remember
his career of the past few months; his friends objected when
he spoke of himself as a Conservative. ‘But what in Heaven’s
name am I?’ he wrote desperately. Possibly there was a faint
tinge of irony in the ‘amiable message’ sent through Skittles
from the Prince of Wales hoping that Blunt will ‘get into
Parliament this time, whichever side it may be, ‘as there is a
want of gentlemen in the House.’

3

Mrs. Howard’s welcome to him into the Liberal fold after
his defection into Tory ranks was a good omen. The prodigal
returned to pay a New Year’s visit to her at Naworth Castle,
arriving an hour or more before daylight. ‘I had to walk from
the station,’ he wrote, ‘a wild, blowy, pitch dark morning.
But it is fortunately a quite straight road, There is something
exciting about being out in the dark before the dawn, and I
felt like a moss trooper on a raid. When I arrived at the old
Border castle the door stood open and I had got upstairs
before I met anybody, and then only a housemaid over whom
I stumbled in a dark passage cleaning the floor. . . . All
Naworth is unchanged, children, governesses, and tutors, in
the same noisy order which surprised me the first time I came
here. The racket does one good, and the discomfort, for all
our evils come from too much ease and selfishness. At twelve
we rode and got wet through, and in the afternoon played
hockey.’

Among others, James Anthony Froude was a fellow guest
at Naworth — ‘I never,’ said Blunt, ‘was more taken with

213

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1886

anyone than with Froude, from the moment he came into the
room and spoke, for his voice is the most sympathetic in the
world, and I am always attracted by old men.’ They had
much talk together, of course about Irish politics and a great
discussion about Rousseau whom Froude condemned unspar-
ingly. ‘He said, “I hate him. I once got caught by him like
a fly in treacle.” ’ Blunt had the same feeling though he
thought the Confessions ‘a most beautiful book’.

The visit was altogether happy; riding, shooting, balls —
everything turned out well. The tenants’ ball especially
delighted him: ‘unlike other tenants’ balls in that there was
absolutely no gine between host and guests. Mrs. Howard
was there with all her children, from the eldest to the youngest,
and all present seemed absolutely pleased.’ Blunt departed
refreshed, observing, ‘The life of this house is like that of a
Bedouin camp’.

Later in January the Liberal Government came in on
Chamberlain’s cry of ‘three acres and a cow’. Blunt began
intensive work for Irish Home Rule, arranging for the
foundation of the British Home Rule League and making
two journeys in Ireland in search of first-hand information.
And, in early June, the Liberal whips asked him to stand as
supporter of Gladstone’s Irish policy. As it bound him to
nothing beyond his own opinions, he decided to accept,
although he doubted if a good constituency could be found
for him. Two things as he said were against him, his quarrel
with Gladstone about Egypt and more important, his Roman
Catholicism which at the moment was a bar to Parliament
because of the Irish difficulties. He was told at the Liberal
office: ‘We have a good many Catholic candidates on our lists,
but the constituencies say “Give us a Jew, if you like, but not
a Catholic.” ’

On June 8th the Liberals’ Home Rule Bill was defeated
and soon the general elections began. It was suggested that
Blunt should bear the brunt of the proposed demonstration
against Chamberlain by standing against him in his own West

1 8 8 6 HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING 213

Birmingham Division. Though there was no chance of
victory, Blunt impulsively plunged again: ‘This is a great
undertaking, but it is useless to shrink from the battle when
it comes. It is a good maxim to follow, “When you are in
doubt to do a thing or not do it — do it.’” He accepted the
Birmingham invitation, published his address and prepared
for his first meeting. Again the Liberal whips failed to support
him, and the Birmingham electors, terrified by Chamberlain,
did not dare, notwithstanding their favourable protestations,
openly to attend even his first meeting. Disgusted — ‘these
Birmingham people are miserable hares’ — he retired, having
lost his temper and told a number of truths concerning
Chamberlain to the few brave enough to listen. Then,
characteristically refusing to be downed, he took the train to
Kidderminster in answer to the eager demands of the Liberals
of that constituency.

Although he arrived, sound asleep in his carriage, well on
in the night, the delighted Kidderminster electors received
him with a great ovation. They carried through the whole
campaign with the same enthusiasm; but, by the narrow
margin of 288 votes, the election was lost. The Gladstonian
rout was everywhere complete. Never, Blunt wrote, had he
‘felt a defeat less for the campaign has not been thrown away
and indeed we have done our best. The Home Rule candidates
are falling all round us like ninepins, and, compared with most,
our fight with Kidderminster was a capital one’. A year later
the Kidderminster weavers presented him with a handsome
carpet for the hall at Crabbet in token of the fight.

4

If he bore his own defeat stoutly, the general Liberal holo-
caust dismayed him. In common with all friends of Ireland
he felt that it portended a long and perhaps hopeless delay
for Irish Home Rule. And he was disheartened by his own

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1886

214

impotence in the Irish cause. There were circumstances, too,
about this time, he wrote, which ‘perplexed and worried me
to the point that, as is often the case with men of imagination
when they come to the turning-point between youth and age
(and I was forty-six), I found myself disgusted with the
emptiness of life’s ordinary things, and entertained for a while
a serious thought of retiring altogether from the world as
dervish, monk, or hermit, notwithstanding the fact that I
lacked the essential quality of a distinct religious faith’. He
resolved to give up the phase of active life — a resolve that he
was to make often thereafter, and as often to break — and
betake himself to what he remarked was the rational end of
all existence, the life contemplative. ‘I am getting weary of
politics,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘and feel the third stage of my
life — the stage of contemplation — rapidly approaching, and
I doubt whether I shall ever take active part in the world’s
ways again.’

In this mood, he decided to spend the winter at Rome
towards which he was doubly attracted, by recollections of his
childhood in Italy, and, still more, by his ‘recent intercourse
with those best representatives of Christianity in Europe, the
Irish clergy and people’. He was curious, too, to discover the
real attitude of the Vatican towards Irish politics.

Encouraged by Cardinal Manning who said ‘You will get
back there into the rut of centuries, and it will do you good’,
towards the end of October Blunt journeyed with Lady Anne
to the ‘Sacred City’, a ‘new pilgrimage’ about which he
composed a series of sonnets that were published three years
later. ‘How staid is Italy’, he wrote,

no gardened rose

Scattering its leaves is chaster than she is.

No cloister stiller, no retreat more close.

There is a tameness even in her seas
On which white towns look down, as who should say,

‘Here wise men long have lived, and live to-day.’ . . .

215

1886-1887 HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

Yes, Italy is wise, a cultured prude.

Stored with all maxims of a statelier age;

These are her lessons for our northern blood,

With its dark Saxon madness and Norse rage. . . .

At last I kneel in Rome, the bourne, the goal
Of what a multitude of laden hearts !

No pilgrim of them all a wearier soul

Brought ever here, no master of dark arts
A spirit vexed with more discordant parts. . . .

I kneel and make an offering of my care

And folly, and hurt reason. Who would not

In this fair city be the fool of prayer?

Who would not kneel, if only for the lot

Of being born again — a soul forgiven,

Clothed in new childhood and the light of Heaven?

Taking up their quarters in the Piazza di Spagna, the Blunts
made it their business to see much of clerical society, parti-
cularly of the Irish. Every one of the clergy at Rome, they
found, except the English, sympathized with Ireland. They
were on pleasant terms, nevertheless, with the representatives
of English interests at the Vatican, Cardinal Howard and
Monsignor Stonor; the latter advised and procured for Blunt
an audience with the Pope. In A New Pilgrimage and again
many years later Blunt described this audience. ‘I had brought
my old diplomatic uniform with me, I know not with what
prevision, and it was in that dress that I went to the Vatican,
where I was received by the Papal household with marked
distinction. They thought, I believe, that I had some diplo-
matic mission, for Pope Leo was highly interested in the idea
of a renewal of diplomatic relations with our F.O., and so I
was admitted to the most private of private audiences. Be this
as it may, my reception by His Holiness was of a kind which
surprised and touched me almost to bewilderment when I
heard the door shut behind me, and I found myself absolutely

2x6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1886-1887

alone with one so nearly divine, if there was divinity anywhere
to be found on earth. . . . When I had kissed his feet he raised
me up, though I continued kneeling and on his invitation
spoke to him about Ireland .... What I cannot here altogether
say is, that the personal interest he seemed to take in me, for
he continued to hold my left hand with his own right hand
and to press it to his knee, gave me the courage to speak of
my own spiritual affairs as in a confessional and to ask his help.
He could not give me all I asked, but when I left him it was
in tears. I had been with him for over twenty minutes, and
the chamberlains when I found myself outside the audience
chamber, cast on me eyes of reproval for having been so long,
and they seemed to guess to such little purpose.’

The Blunts saw something, too, of Roman society, and
rode and hunted on the Campagna — ‘I can see him now,’
wrote Esme Howard in his Theatre oj Life , ‘after the
day was over, with his hat off and his hair disordered by the
wind, galloping over the Campagna like a mad man, giving
me a display of how Arab sheykhs yelled when they were in
pursuit of gazelles over the Arabian desert.’ They visited
the great farm and stud of Signor Piacentini, and spent a week
as they were to do in future years, at Fogliano, beyond the
Pontine marshes, the country house of the Duke and Duchess
of Sermoneta. The most perfect country place, Blunt wrote,
it had been his lot in a life of travel to see.

But try as he might to withdraw from politics, political
discussion was inevitable and the news of the day inevitably
stirred him. When word came in mid-January that Drum-
mond Wolff had been ordered to make a final attempt to
work out his Turkish convention, it seemed imperative that
he should return to Egypt to find out what was happening
politically. He wished, moreover, to look into the condition
of his property there which had been left pretty much to go
to ruin since 1882.

1887

HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING

217

5

When Blunt had proposed in 1886 to go out to Egypt,
Lord Salisbury, although he had withdrawn the order for
Blunt’s exclusion, had requested him to put off his journey
because of the inflamed condition of public sentiment there
resulting from Drummond Wolff’s negotiations. Blunt’s
presence, it had been felt, would increase the unrest. Now, a
year later, Blunt again notified Lord Salisbury of his intended
journey and received a wire: ‘Your letter received, Baring
says no objection.’

To the Blunts the trip from Alexandria to Cairo, along the
line of Egyptian flight after the bombardment in 1882, was
melancholy enough. Nor was their scorn of the English
occupation decreased by what they saw of its results. From
Princess Nazli, a strong supporter of Arabi, and from other
isolated individuals, they gained much information and on a
week’s camping trip to Tel-el-Kebir and the camp of Sheykh
Saoud-el-Tihawi, Arabi’s Bedouin betrayer, confirmed much
that they already knew or suspected. Blunt came in touch,
also, with the adviser of the Turkish envoy through whom
he learned of the situation in regard to Drummond Wolff’s
convention.

At Sheykh Obeyd he found the trees much injured for lack
of water and the whole garden sadly damaged. With the
expenditure of £200 the garden could be brought back almost
to its old perfection and ‘if worst came to the worst in England’,
Blunt wrote, ‘one could always make a living out of this
garden, and, with £$00 a year besides, live in it like kings.’
Aid, his camel man, when notified that he was in Cairo,
ran fifty miles to Suez and took train from there to tell
him that his herd of camels was safe among the Towara
Bedouins.

These matters had hardly been settled when he received an
official warning from Valentine Baker Pasha that his visit to

218 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1887

Hajji Saoud had been reported to the police. The letter
seemed to betoken further measures. Blunt was intensely
annoyed: ‘It is very absurd their having pitched upon this
visit as a text for remonstrance, and I have written to Lord
Salisbury expostulating. It is too absurd that I am to be
put upon a sort of parole , and at the same time watched. For
the future I shall give no pledges and take my chance of
arrest.’

His disgust at this warning, and at learning that there was
a long black list at Abdin Palace of people known to have
spoken to him, was somewhat offset by his last days in Egypt
spent at the Mowled held at Abu Seriyeh, three days’ march
through the desert southwards from Sheykh Obeyd. An im-
mense concourse of Arabs and fellahin from all the western
delta and the western lands above Cairo gathered there with
no government supervision in the early March of each year.
Desert life again absorbed the Blunts ; in the East they found
the peace that even Rome could not give them.

They returned to England refreshed in spirit. Undeterred
by having spent quite ,£8,000 on politics within the last five
years, Blunt allowed himself again to be drawn in; wrote
letters about Egypt; made speeches to aid the cause of Irish
Home Rule — among others one at the Oxford Union where
he enjoyed himself ‘amazingly’, making many friends among
the rising generation and writing afterwards, ‘there is nothing
in the world as agreeable as living with undergraduates at a
university if you have any claim on their intellectual regard’ ;
attended meetings of this sort and that, even acting as chair-
man, though only in the attitude of friendly neutrality, of a
Women’s Suffrage meeting.

In mid-July Drummond Wolff’s Turkish convention en-
tirely broke down. There seemed no use in struggling any
more for Egypt and Blunt turned his whole political attention
to Ireland. During the next few months he again journeyed
to Ireland gathering information and taking part in meetings.
A very imperfect party man, however, he severed in July his

i 887-1 888 HORSES AND ELECTIONEERING 219

party relations with Kidderminster and was in doubt whether
or not to return to the Conservative fold.

Having decided to stick to the Liberals he was persuaded,
late in the year, by his friend Sir John Evelyn,

. . . who lately stood in fight
With the new dragons of the Primrose rite,

And broke a lance for Ireland and the cause
Of freedom, flouted by coercion laws,

to accept the candidacy of Deptford which Evelyn proposed to
resign. Instead of conducting the campaign himself he again
went to Ireland, held a proclaimed meeting, was imprisoned
and sent up for trial, leaving the election canvassing to his
wife and numerous enthusiastic supporters among whom,
oddly enough, was Miss Gladstone. Nevertheless this, his
third campaign, almost certainly would have been successful
had he vindicated himself legally in Ireland. But just before
the election he failed to win his case; the Deptford constituents
were unable to withstand the blow; and again, for the third
time, Blunt lost his contest, this time to Charles Darling, later
Lord Darling of Langham.

It was the end of his excursion into domestic politics and
his last attempt to enter Parliament. Though after his release
in March 1888, several Irish constituencies tried to persuade
him to stand for them, he consistently refused. He had always
opposed Englishmen being given Irish seats as a danger to
Ireland and would not permit an exception in his own favour.

CHAPTER XI

IRELAND

i

Blunt’s Irish adventures were picturesque enough to encour-
age the belief that vanity and pleasure in making mischief
were the sole .motives of his political action. He himself
protested,

God knows, ’twas not with a fore-reasoned plan
I left the easeful dwellings of my peace.

He thought only ‘to do a deed of chivalry, an act of worth’,
that might be recorded in the sight of his ‘mistress Liberty’,
and of the nations.

Actually, the experience entailed hardship far too real and
too inevitable to be undergone without genuine conviction.
Any cause, furthermore, based like the Egyptian Movement
on religious tradition and the claims of justice appealed to
him, and the Irish cause was doubly sympathetic for, as he
acknowledged, his Catholic upbringing had influenced him in
favour of Catholic Ireland.

Disabled by his Camberwell defeat in 1885 from doing
anything to aid the cause of Ireland through government
channels, he set to work, as he had in the case of Egypt, to
uphold it unofflcially. He began to frequent the Irish National
League office and to speak at League meetings until, on
March nth, he was unanimously elected a member of the
League and was able to write with some satisfaction, ‘I fancy
I am the first Englishman of any position who has been
accepted by them. They are all extremely good fellows,
moderate and sensible in their views, and it is evident have no

220

IRELAND

221

X885-1886

unconquerable hatred for Englishmen.’ Shortly before, with
Lord Ashburnham, George T. Kenyon and Joseph Cowen,
he had founded the British Home Rule Association — after-
wards called the Home Rule Union — lending it his James
Street house for temporary offices and his private secretary,
Edward Hope, for secretary. He went up to Cambridge
where, as the Union was afraid to sponsor him, he spoke for
Home Rule at a special meeting and made strong allies of
several undergraduate converts. And he composed a sonnet
on Ireland — ‘Ireland’s Vengeance’ — which Knowles refused
to publish in the Nineteenth Centnry not because he did not
agree with Blunt that it was a good sonnet, but because, as he
explained, he never accepted any poetry ‘except from Tennyson
and Mat Arnold, and had refused Swinburne last week’.

Morley’s appointment to the Irish Secretaryship followed
the Liberal victory in January and Blunt hoped that Irish
hardships would be mitigated. Morley had written him that
he would ‘try to do his best in spite of Parliament, Party, the
ignorant Press, and other devilries’. But as weeks passed,
news came of more, rather than fewer, evictions. Blunt
decided to visit Ireland to study the land question, so that he
could ‘bring the injustice of the Land Laws as administered
by English insistence on legal ideas, foreign to the traditions
and morality of the Irish peasantry, home to the London
public’.

For most Englishmen such a tour would have presented
difficulties. Not for Blunt. By temperament he was suited
to it. Besides it was made ‘possible and easy’, he wrote later,
by his anti-imperialism, his independence of party, his Catholic
upbringing, and his position as an English landlord. He was
‘no ignoramus, as nearly all the Radical supporters of Home
Rule in the House of Commons were, in agricultural matters’.
And, he added, ‘there is no country in the world where social
position carries more weight with it than Ireland’.

Hardly had Blunt arrived in Dublin and paid a round of
visits to Archbishop Walsh and the Lord Mayor and others

222

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1886

when a telegram reached him at the National League Office
begging him to go to Roscommon where evictions were under
way. Without letters or any certain directions he started the
next morning on what seemed ‘a kind of goose chase’ for the
bogs of Roscommon. Following the safe rule, he went to the
priest at Boyle, the nearest station to Roscommon, who
promised to put him in the way of gaining information,
although, for the moment, evictions had ceased.

Blunt soon grasped the fact that in this part of Ireland —
and, he was to learn later, throughout the country — the land
question was the important point. The people at Roscommon
cared little for Home Rule apart from it. Home Rule was
only a means to an end. What they wanted was low, fair rents.

Rent? Who speaks of the rent? We Irish, who till the soil,
Are ever ready to pay the tribute your laws impose ;

You, the conquering race, have portioned to each his toil;
We, the conquered, bring the ransom due to our woes.

Here is no case of justice, of just debts made or unjust.
Contracts ’twixt freemen are, not here, where but one
is free.

No man argues of right, who pays the toll that he must;
Life is dear to all, and rent is the leave to be.

Blunt gathered particulars about the neighbouring estates,
especially about Colonel King-Harman’s; and drove out eleven
miles in the pouring rain to Keadue to talk with evicted
peasants. He then sent the first of a series of letters on Irish
affairs to the Pall Mall Gazette.

Considering that the trip to Roscommon had been unpre-
meditated, it had been most successful. But, not to waste
time, Michael Davitt now made out an itinerary for him, gave
him letters of introduction, and started him off again, through
the icy cold wind and snow, to the north, to Gweedore. There
the priest, Father McFadden, was holding a ‘station’ — in
England it would be called a ‘religious retreat’. He found the

i 8 8 6

IRELAND

223

little house where it was held packed with nearly a hundred
people, men and women, and three cows and some fowls.
‘Father McFadden was going round giving the communion,
after which the priest’s horse was also brought inside. It was
a very curious and impressive sight, which I am glad to have
seen. I have witnessed no such great faith anywhere — no, not
in Arabia!’

From Gweedore, where the villages reminded him of a
Bedouin camp, he travelled by jaunting car through picturesque
but very poor country of granite and heath to Donegal, spend-
ing each night with the local priest. In Donegal he stopped
with the Mayor and his family: ‘His sisters, four enthusiastic
young patriotesses, played the piano and sang “The wearing
of the Green” to me, and other such melodies, and then made
me give them a lecture on the Egyptian war and the Mahdi.’

Southward, down the coast through Sligo, he went to
Ballaghderin, where he stayed with Mrs. Deane, first cousin
of the Irish leader John Dillon, her adopted son, much of
whose history she confided to Blunt. ‘I have enjoyed my
talks with Mrs. Deane more than anything yet, and they have
been more instructive,’ Blunt wrote. But within a day,
journeying to Loughrea, he was stirred deeply by Dr. Duggan,
Bishop of Clonfert. ‘He is the most wonderful and enchanting
old man I have seen for many years.’ He lived in a dilapidated
house called the Palace, waited on by an old peasant woman
and a little foundling boy, giving his life and all he possessed
to helping his people in the struggle for their rights. The state
of Ireland was, to Dr. Duggan, one of war between peasants
and landlords and in war he considered that all’s fair that
leads to victory, however unjustifiable such action might seem
in time of peace. His austere life and passionate struggle
touched Blunt and his wit delighted him.

They drove together to visit the site of Aughrim, the last
battle fought by the Irish against William of Orange. * “They
call it the last battle,” the Bishop said, as we stood on rising
ground looking over the plain, “but this is not true, for the

224

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1886

battle has gone on ever since.” ’ ‘I dined with him in the
evening,’ Blunt related, ‘and still he talked and talked and
always with a smile on his lips and tears in his eyes, till he made
me also cry. ... I afterwards described this talk with Dr.
Duggan in “The Canon of Aughrim.” ’ About this long and
vigorous poem Lady Gregory wrote, ‘Sir William says the
Canon is wonderfully good and will do a great deal of mischief
which I know is the compliment you will really care for.’
It is Blunt’s vindication of the Irish Home Ruler’s point of
view and rebellion.

Near by Loughrea was the village of Woodford, later to
figure largely in Blunt’s Irish adventure, belonging to an
absentee landlord the Marquess of Clanricarde. In the
diplomatic service in former years Blunt had known Clanri-
carde well, first as Lord Hubert de Burgh, then as Lord
Burke, and had seen him ‘pretty frequently at Paris in the
’sixties where he was one of the young men in attendance
upon Skittles, and later when he had become Lord Clanricarde
at the Travellers’ Club in London’. A month before Blunt’s
arrival in Loughrea the process server, Finlay, had been
murdered at Woodford. The village was seething with unrest
and Dr. Duggan asked Blunt during the four days he stayed
with him to talk over their grievances with the chief villagers,
Roche, the hospitable miller who was to support Blunt so well
later, and Keary, the respectable tradesman whose meadow
was to figure importantly in his future history. With his gift
for charming people and drawing them out Blunt not only
worked them into a more conciliatory mood but obtained
from them much useful knowledge of local conditions and,
more necessary for the future, gained their confidence.

In response to a wire from Father Reddy that the evictions
were to be renewed on Lord Kingston’s estate, Blunt sped to
Arigna. ‘It was an absurd and brutal spectacle,’ Blunt noted
in his diary of this first experience of evictions. ‘The sight
made me so angry that I was positively ill, my heart hurting
me. . . . When it was over for the day we went back and I

IRELAND

1886

225

had some milk with Father Quinn. Though I am ill, I am
glad that I came. No one can understand what the Irish ques-
tion is till he has seen an eviction.’ It was less the physical,
bad as that was, than the moral effect of eviction that he
deplored. The Canon of Aughrim told of an eviction:

This is the death of the body. . . .

Every eviction in Ireland brings one such physical loss. . . .
Not for these is my anger. . . .

But what of that other death for which love strews no roses,
Death of the altered soul, lost, perished, forever gone?

‘Deep in the gulf of your cities they lie, the poor lone
creatures,

Made in God’s image once, his folded innocent sheep,
Now misused and profaned, in speech and form and
features

Living like devils and dying like dogs in incestuous
sleep.

On the third day at Arigna nobody was thrown out. At the
fourth house proceedings stopped — ‘and high time,’ observed
Blunt. ‘All this marching and counter-marching, this parade
of armed men, has resulted in nothing more satisfactory for
the landlord than the collection of about £20 ; this at the cost
to the Government, we computed, of about £1,000. What
absurd laws! What a ludicrous scheme of Government!
I have written a letter to the Pall Mall , the strongest I ever
wrote in my life; and, if Stead only publishes it, it will put a
stop to all the atrocities.’

Blunt’s letters to the Pall Mall had already brought two
violent answers from Colonel King-Harman and a letter from
Lord Kingston laying ‘all the blame upon the League’. After
the Arigna evictions Kingston asked Blunt to talk the situation
over with him. Nothing useful came of the interview but it
encouraged Blunt to offer to discuss matters with King-
Harman also. The Colonel’s reply was ‘another preposterous

226 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1886

letter’ that freed Blunt, he felt, from any duty of consideration
towards him. After examining more of the Colonel’s tenants,
he was sure that he had enough evidence to smash King-
Harman. Later, hearing from Sidney Herbert in London that
King-Harman was thirsting for his blood, it occurred to him
that the chivalrous solution was to send word that, if the
Colonel wished, he would fight him. The idea appealed to
his dramatic sense but Button said it would be ‘ridiculous’.

All the great Irish landlords, Blunt found, on returning to
London, felt that it was unnecessary to retell the well-known
story of evictions, and were especially angry with him for his
attack on Lord Kingston in the Pall Mall Gazette'. ‘Their
anger, however, means that I have hit them hard, so I don’t
mind.’ The Irish M.P.’s Healy, Dillon and O’Brien expressed
themselves as delighted by Blunt’s work and Morley con-
gratulated him on his letters to the Pall Mall Gazette , saying
that they had done excellent work. ‘I am glad of this,’ Blunt
wrote, ‘because Lady Gregory told me she had met Eddy
Hamilton, who complained of my having put my oar in at
the wrong time and done more harm than good. But Morley
was very decided that I had done good work for Ireland.’
It was a hard blow to his continuation of the good work to
have Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall , overwhelmed by
remonstrances and afraid of a libel suit, refuse to publish any
more of his letters.

He was forced to have recourse wholly to speeches and
conversation. In order to make his own position impregnable
before renewing the campaign he consulted Bates, his bailiff,
about his own farms at Crabbet. Bates confirmed his fear that
they were rented too high and that his agent, Laprimaudaye,
was too hard on the tenants. Forthwith, Blunt reduced the
rents and left himself free to pluck the mote from the eyes of
Irish landlords . 1

i 8 8 6

IRELAND

22 7

2

His experience in Ireland had taught him that the Land
League 2 was based upon necessity, and that it organized and
restrained the people from outrageous acts rather than incited
them; that the clergy were the backbone of the movement
and kept it in hand; and most clearly, he had come to realize
that ‘it is absurd to argue that the landlord, who destroys a
hundred families by evicting them, is guiltless because his
act is legal, and that the peasant who resists or retaliates is
a murderer because his blows are illegal. There must be a
principle of justice underlying the law, or the law itself is
a crime.’

These ideas were the result of an examination of a few
parts only of Northern Ireland. He determined now to learn
the situation in other parts of Ireland in order to strengthen a
favourable public opinion for the forthcoming second reading
of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill. Far less confident that the
bill would pass than were Morley or the Irish M.P.’s with
whom he discussed it, and fearful lest its failure would endanger
Home Rule altogether, he started once more, in mid-May, for
Dublin and the south of Ireland. His spirits were cheered on
the journey by hearing two priests, who did not recognize
him, praise his fight with King-Harman. And in Dublin,
Michael Davitt spoke of his work with great warmth, saying
that all the Irish party were enthusiastic about him. He had
heard Parnell speak in such terms of Blunt’s work that he
was sure the Irish leader would value his opinion, and he urged
Blunt to beg Parnell not to neglect the land struggle.

By Davitt’s advice, he went first to Thurles to consult that
staunch upholder of Nationalism, Archbishop Croke, on his
further movements. The Archbishop described how he had
broken the power of the landlords in his diocese by a stubborn
resistance and blamed those Bishops who had refused to help
the people against the landlords as the sponsors of crime.

328 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1886

When Blunt reached the ‘moonlighting’ district of Kerry
where the priests had been forbidden by their Bishop to aid
the people, he was convinced of the truth of the Archbishop’s
words. Only where the restraining guidance of an actively
sympathetic clergy was lacking, it seemed to him, was crime
rife. Blunt, speaking from a window to a large gathering,
exhorted the people of Castle Island to patience, and explained
‘how every outrage, down to the cutting off of a cow’s tail
was an injury just now to their cause.’ And he had much
conciliatory talk at a meeting where several moonlighters and
one known murderer were present. ‘I am convinced,’ he
wrote, ‘that there should be no difficulty in ending the whole
trouble if only a little humanity were used.’

Having examined Munster ‘pretty thoroughly’, Blunt went
off for a short holiday in Paris and then retired to Crabbet
for a rest. But he was down-hearted. Early in June he
recorded in his diary: ‘A raw cold day, but walked about in
Burley’s wood listening to the thrushes and blackbirds and
felt dissatisfied. One certainly leads a solitary life in England
as a country squire, and I am not sure that the Irish peasants
with all their troubles are not happier.’ The Home Rule Bill
upset him. Its ups and downs were ‘endless’. When at last
it was thrown out on June 7th he felt that the Irish cause
had undergone ‘almost an irretrievable disaster’. ‘The Arabs
were my first political love,’ he wrote, ‘and I loved them
passionately, but it was of no avail: it is coming to be the
same for me with the Irish.’

As usual his activities drew jeers from those who did not
agree with him. Lady Gregory, although she tried later to
help him in prison, was by no means in sympathy with Blunt’s
Irish doings — the one break in their forty-years’ friendship,
and happily not a long one. She wrote to a friend at about
this time: ‘Oh, and I must tell you that Wilfrid Blunt who
has been moonlighting in Ireland in the interests of the Land
League had to leave suddenly because going there in Lent,
as a good Catholic he was expected to fast like his entertainers,

IRELAND

1886-1887

229

but just like the stork and fox, they made up with whisky
punch, while he (being a Mohammedan teetotaller) was set
down to salt cod and cold water, and even on feast days he
was not much better off as he won’t touch the flesh of the pig
on religious grounds. 3 So having lived off tea and toast for
a fortnight his nerves broke down, and he has had to make a
rush for Paris, and spend his time dining at the best restaurants,
and now he feels well enough to begin a fresh campaign.’ 4

During the two months of despair regarding things Irish,
while he was contesting the election at Kidderminster and
before he left for Rome, he continued to see much of the
Irish M.P.’s of whom he wrote: ‘These Irish members have
more statesmanship in their little fingers than our Cabinet
Ministers have in all their dull heads.’ And shortly after the
failure of the Home Rule Bill he attended a great mass meeting
at Liverpool where he was well received and spoke for two hours
— one of the best speeches he had ever made. Even during
his months in Italy he continued to do what he could for the
movement, writing to The Times , for instance, at Prior Glynn’s
urgent request, in support of Archbishop Walsh.

Not long after his return to England there was a great
procession and demonstration in Hyde Park against Irish
coercion which is described in his diary. ‘Went up to London
in the morning, and at two took up a dozen members of the
Home Rule Union at Westminster in my break and joined
the procession. We passed Northumberland Avenue, Pall
Mall, St. James’s Street, and Piccadilly, stopping to hoot at
the Carlton Club and Brooks’s — the last, at my suggestion,
for the Liberal Unionists — and to cheer Mrs. Gladstone and
her daughter Mary, who were sitting at a window in Picca-
dilly. Queen of Sheba and Haifa, though they had never been
in London before, did their work well, and pulled the break
gallantly. There was an immense concourse in the park, but
we got through without difficulty, and took our places at
platform 13. I took the chair and opened proceedings, and
T. P. O’Connor spoke for half an hour with ornate Hibernian

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

230

1887

eloquence. The socialists were close alongside of us, Davitt
being their principal speaker. But there was a second platform
for Morris’s section, and I saw May Morris on their cart
like a French revolutionist going to execution. ... I suppose
there must have been close on 10,000 round our platform to
hear O’Connor. ... A good many of these were Irish. But
on the whole it was a fair political crowd, quite orderly and
sober. During the whole afternoon I only saw one drunken
man. . . . Frederic Harrison came to our platform after-
wards. He said he could hear my voice plainer than any of
the other speakers, which is satisfactory; but it was a lovely
day for speaking, with very little wind, and all in our favour.
Coming back I drove T.P. on the box seat, and we received
a good deal of cheering. I went into the St. James’s Club
afterwards, and then to A’s, a very different world; and
altogether it has been a curious experience.’

His Irish speeches at this time were interspersed with
speeches on Egypt — one, to his ironic delight, at the Palmer-
ston Club at Oxford. Egypt had long since become the
background of his political thought by which he reached his
political judgments. But by mid-July he again turned wholly
to Ireland. Cardinal Manning suggested that he might be
of use in explaining to the Papal envoys the morality of the
Plan of Campaign, 5 boycotting, intimidation, and other
features of the Irish agrarian war, which they were being sent
to Ireland to inquire into. The suggestion was no sooner
given than, with characteristic impetuosity, it was seized upon.
Blunt, taking with him as companion Arthur Pollen, an
Oxford undergraduate and son of his old friend Mrs. Hunger-
ford Pollen, went to Dublin the following day. After seeing
Archbishop Walsh, he had a long interview with the Papal
envoys. They were particularly impressed by the fact that
he was an English gentleman and a landlord as well as an
upholder of Irish Nationalism: ‘This they said was “good
testimony”.’

One of the pleasantest happenings of this Irish visit was

IRELAND

1887

231

a call on the wife of the Lord Mayor of Dublin — ‘the Lady
Mayoress’ as the butler called her — of which Blunt told in
his diary: ‘She is a clever woman, with some wit, and amused
us not a little. ... It was curious to see the old-fashioned
Dublin Mansion House, with its civic glories, its portraits of
defunct English functionaries, and its ballroom built for
George IV, inhabited by this little middle-aged Irish Catholic
woman, who poked her fun at their pomposities, and pointed
out to us the Harp deprived of the Crown. It was enough
to make some of her predecessors of the Protestant Ascendancy
turn in their grave. But these are the little revenges of history
which console us for much injustice in the modern world.’

Both Michael Davitt and William O’Brien were in Dublin
and by their advice Blunt and Pollen went down to Gorey to
attend the trial of the eviction prisoners. A most impressive
exhibition of cleverness and wit they found it. O’Brien
followed them several days later and they all proceeded to
Luggacurran where O’Brien spoke to a crowd of three
thousand, Blunt refusing to go on the platform ‘though much
pressed to do so’, or to allow Pollen to speak. ‘If the police
had interfered,’ he wrote, ‘I should have made a protest; but
there was really no call for English intervention.’

3

It was after this third trip to Nationalist Ireland and a
holiday of grouse shooting in Scotland with Prince Wagram
that Blunt’s notorious talk with Arthur Balfour, the Chief
Secretary for Ireland, took place. They had a slight acquain-
tance, both being frequenters of the Wyndham circle where
Blunt knew Balfour ‘chiefly as a lover of music and the fine
arts, a pleasant talker, and an entirely amiable man of society’.
Broadly speaking, no two men could have been further apart
in point of view and way of thought, a divergence recognized
by Blunt in explicit, characteristic terms in his Land War in

232

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1887

Ireland. Balfour, as Blunt wrote, belonged philosophically to
a school of thought that ‘bases its view of human things on
what it considers to be the teachings of modern science’ — the
rule of the survival of the fittest.

To Blunt ‘this was supremely repellent’. His own inter-
pretation of the theory of evolution — which has already been
given — was diametrically opposed to it. And his appreciation
of ‘the aesthetic’ aspect of the case also conflicted with Balfour’s
views. ‘As it applied to Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘what I had seen
of the poor Catholic Celts convinced me that with all their
poverty, and lack of comfort in which they lived, they were a
happier people far than our English peasantry, even in Sussex,
the most favoured of all counties ; that they were social, joyous
and dignified by their religion, and that as such they were both
better fitted for the land in which they lived and which they
passionately loved, than could be any new band of immigrants
which could take their place from Scotland or England. The
world would certainly be poorer for the loss of them. If I
pitied them it was not for the poverty of their dwellings, for
the broken thatch and the gaps in their walls letting in the
rain, but for the English laws which were driving them from
these happy homes, and for the grim fate that awaited them as
outcasts in our English and American cities. On all these
matters, Balfour and I stood a whole world apart.’

Early in September, when it was expected that the first
strong measures under the Crimes Act 6 might lead to blood-
shed at a National League Meeting to be held next day,
Balfour and Blunt met again at the Percy Wyndhams’ at
Clouds. ‘I am sorry for Dillon,’ Balfour said at dinner, ‘as if
he gets into prison it is likely to kill him. He will have hard
labour, and it will be quite a different thing from Forster’s
ridiculous imprisonments at Kilmainham. There is something
almost interesting about Dillon; but it is a pity he lies so.
He is afraid of prison, and he is right, as it will probably kill
him.’ What appeared to him to be the extreme cold-blooded
cruelty of these remarks profoundly shocked Blunt and

IRELAND

1887

233

impressed them on his mind ineradicably. In the evening
the impression was deepened by Balfour’s remarking that
‘there is no more vain and foolish thing than remorse’.

The next day the two men ‘had it out about Ireland’.
Balfour maintained that Blunt exaggerated the extent and
sincerity of the Home Rule movement which was not a genuine
National one, but depended for its vitality on half a dozen
men of influence. If they were got rid of the whole move-
ment would collapse. Blunt asked him who these were ‘and
he named the chief Parliamentary leaders, especially Messrs.
Dillon and O’Brien, and Mr. Michael Davitt. These could
be dealt with through the operation of the Crimes Act if they
dared to hold their ground. “But,” he said, “they are afraid
of prison and will leave the country”.’ Blunt objected,
remarking that they would go to prison and that would
strengthen the movement. ‘Oh no,’ said Balfour, ‘it will be
very different now. We are not going to have any such
nonsense as Forster had. They will be quite differently dealt
with. They will get severe imprisonment with hard labour —
so severe that those who have not strong health will not be
able to stand it. I shall be sorry for Dillon as he has got some
good about him. He will get six months’ hard labour, and,
as he has bad health, it will kill him.’

Unaware of the consequences that this talk with Balfour
was to have Blunt merely noted in his diary, ‘it is rather absurd
my being here playing tennis with the Chief Secretary on the
very day and at the very hour of the Ballycoreen meeting,
where he evidently expects bloodshed.’ After leaving Clouds
he went his usual way, making speeches and writing letters.
Among other things he agreed — though as he said it was not
much in his line — to support T. P. O’Connor in the manage-
ment of a new halfpenny evening paper, the Star , of which
for a year he remained a director. Learning of the fight at
Mitchelstown while stopping with the Howards at Naworth
Castle, he made up his mind to go again to Ireland. ‘There
are so many who have shirked committing themselves that, it

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

234

1887

would be mean to hold back. I have so often resolved to wait
for the first blood, and now it has been shed. Up to the
present I have never been sure that the Irish meant fighting,
or indeed that the Government would force it on. All the
same, my flesh and blood rebel against any new political
campaign of any kind at a moment when all my ideas are set
on poetry, and when I had absolutely determined to hold
myself free. There is, however, no help for it.’ Mrs. Howard
agreed with him. He decided to accept the suggestion of the
Home Rule Union, which he had turned down a few days
before, to join a deputation of their members to Ireland and
started immediately for Chester to meet it.

The Parliamentary Leaders approved the deputation and
concurred in its programme, but Blunt neither found its
members congenial nor felt any keenness for its plan of action.
Accustomed to work as a free lance he was impatient of the
slower, more cautious methods of committees. For a few days
he attended their meetings, in the intervals talking with his
Irish friends. Soon he was glad to be quit of the deputies and
accept Dillon’s invitation to go with him to a closed meeting
at Limerick.

About one hundred delegates convened at Limerick from
various parts of the country to discuss ways and means for the
coming campaign. It was a great occasion on which the
policy of the League was to be declared. The first resolution
was in protest against O’Brien’s arrest and Dillon asked Blunt
to speak to it: T was glad to do so,’ Blunt wrote in his diary,
‘as O’Brien has been in my head for the last forty-eight hours.’
He was in fact writing the poem, later published among his
Irish poems as the ‘Song of William O’Brien’, inciting Irish
patriots to vindicate the faith for which O’Brien was suffering:

Patriots, rise ! Take rank together,
Fight for God and fight for man ;
In the stormy autumn weather
Strike for freedom and the Plan.

i 8 87

IRELAND

235

He it was who taught you this,

Here your stoutest vengeance is.

Within the next few days he sent it to O’Brien in Cork gaol.
O’Brien wishing to make a test case in order to obtain decent
treatment for political prisoners, refused every possibility of
release from prison.

‘His intention is,’ Blunt wrote in admiration, ‘to refuse the
prison dress, even if they strip him and leave him naked, and
to refuse every menial labour. Thus he will establish the
claim of all political prisoners to proper treatment. But it
will be hard work’ — a prophetic statement and ironic on the
part of one who was to follow so closely O’Brien’s example.

After attending the inquest on the riots at Mitchelstown
and O’Brien’s trial — which seemed a farce with a foregone
conclusion, dictated by Dublin Castle, of a three months’
sentence — Blunt went to see O’Brien in prison and obtained
his promise to appeal and give bail so as to continue his
campaign, and also to let Blunt know whenever he arranged
for a large demonstration. Blunt wished to carry on the war
with the Irish leaders during the autumn, returning to Ireland
with Lady Anne for the demonstration. ‘George Lefevre tells
me,’ Lady Gregory later remarked to him with some malice,
‘that Lady Anne was much more popular amongst the Irish
Nationalists than you. They thought you “too aristocratic!” ’

4

London again; and then a visit with Lady Anne and his
daughter, arranged weeks before for the sake of taking
George Wyndham to the Lyttons at Knebworth, seemed like
‘returning from another world’. But this quiet world of
poetry and talk was not to be Blunt’s for long. In mid-
October a letter came to him at Crabbet from O’Brien telling
him of a meeting to be held at Woodford, County Galway:

2 36 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1887

‘It will be on Lord Clanricarde’s estate and in a “suppressed”
district. The chances are that it will be “proclaimed”, but that
we will of course make provision for. If you would come in
time to attend that meeting it would be a great advantage to
us and I need scarcely say that your wife’s co-operation would
lay us under an additional obligation.’

No more was needed. Three days later found Lady Anne
and her maid, Cowie, established in Dublin and Blunt away
with O’Brien to his meetings in the company of another
Englishman, James Rowlands, M.P. for a London Borough,
and his wife and MacDonald, a Daily News correspondent.
The approach to Woodford had to be managed with some
care : at Tomgreany they held a small meeting in the course of
which O’Brien announced casually, for the benefit of police
reporters whom he knew to be in the audience, that he was
spending the night with the village priest. The party retired
to the priest’s house only to creep down some hours later and
steal away in the dark to Woodford.

Their approach to the village was signalled by the sudden
lighting of bonfires. Presently all the country round was
ablaze and they found themselves escorted triumphantly by
an enthusiastic mob carrying on pitchforks clods of flaring
turf dipped in paraffin. Alighting at Keary’s house, O’Brien
addressed the meeting from an upper window. ‘It was a
dramatic performance, which he concluded appropriately by
burning a copy of the Lord-Lieutenant’s proclamation, which
forbade all public meetings in the district, and defying the
impotence of the law.’ Rowlands and Blunt also spoke.
At two or three in the morning the meeting ended and they
slept at Keary’s house. Too late for the affair a large body of
constabulary and a company of regulars arrived to occupy
the village.

A week afterwards news reached the Blunts in Dublin that
evictions had been renewed at Woodford and a girl’s head
broken in an affray with the police. It occurred to Blunt that
the time had come for him to take action as delegate of the Home

IRELAND

1887

237

Rule Union which had appointed him their representative ‘to
test the validity of the Crimes Act, especially in the matter of
forbidding public meetings, which it was thought could best
be done by placing the Government in the dilemma of having
to arrest an Englishman for doing in Ireland what in England
was admitted to be the right of every peaceable citizen.’ He
decided, with the approval of Dillon and O’Brien, to return
to Woodford to hold, not a secret meeting such as the last,
but a public and announced one.

Arrived at Woodford they found the evictions postponed
and the constabulary departed for Portumna. Their host, ‘the
patriotic miller’, John Roche, strongly advised that the meet-
ing should be held anyway in the hope that it would stop the
evictions completely. Together Blunt and Roche drew up a
handbill of a meeting for the following Sunday, October 23rd,
and got it printed at Loughrea. Blunt’s name alone was to
appear on the handbills as delegate of the Home Rule Union,
but the Rowlands, who had also returned to Woodford for the
evictions, agreed to sit on the platform. On the morning of
the twenty-second the handbills were posted throughout the
town and at Loughrea.

Late that night a wire came from O’Brien warning Blunt
that the meeting had been proclaimed at Dublin and copies
of the proclamation dispatched to Woodford. Fearing that the
Rowlands might not be resolute, Blunt took counsel only with
Roche how ‘to make the meeting as far as possible an English
one, and while defying the authorities publicly and unflinch-
ingly, avoid for the Woodford townspeople the danger of their
being fired on should soldiers be sent to reinforce the police
against them’. The responsibility was heavy. Finally they
arranged to hold the meeting in Keary’s meadow, a paddock of
two or three acres close to the High Street but not adjoining
it, whence the police could not eject them on the pretence that
they were obstructing the thoroughfare; and to call the meeting
for the point of two so that, all things being behind time in
Ireland, no great crowd would assemble. Blunt was to write

238 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1887

‘to the Chief Constable challenging his right to intervene by-
force, and so raise the whole question of the validity of the
Lord Lieutenant’s orders’.

The letter was all but ready at dawn when the Roche
children, sent out to scout, brought word that the village had
been occupied by one hundred and fifty constabulary and a
company of H.M. Scots Guards. ‘This,’ in Blunt’s words,
‘was doing us honour beyond all we could have hoped, and
placed our little meeting on an almost heroic footing.’ Father
Roche, the miller’s brother, at Mass exhorted the assembled
population of Woodford to attend the meeting, paying no
attention to the Proclamation.

Leaving just time enough for a reply to be returned before
the scheduled hour of meeting, Blunt sent off by two new
arrivals — Fagan, a Norfolk ex-parson, and Macer Wright — to
Inspector Byrne, the Divisional Magistrate in command of the
police, and to Major Frere, in command of the regulars,
copies of his letter in answer to the Proclamation. A reply came
in the shape of Inspector Byrne himself who asked Blunt if he
had read the Proclamation and understood that holding a meet-
ing would be illegal. Blunt, in return, asked if Byrne had read
his letter and declared that he would act according to his own
judgment.

At two o’clock the procession formed: Lady Anne, Blunt,
Rowlands and his wife, Fagan, and Macer Wright, with
Sheehy, Roche, Keary and others to escort them to the
platform. As they had calculated, only one or two hundred
townspeople managed to assemble in time. When the pro-
cession reached the meadow, Byrne and four of his constables
contested their entrance. Keary turned the tables by protest-
ing against Byrne’s trespassing in his meadow. Unprepared
for this, the magistrate allowed the procession to reach the plat-
form before waving to the main body of his men to advance.
Wasting no time in preliminaries, Blunt began to address the
assemblage but was immediately interrupted by Byrne who
mounted the platform, asked Blunt formally whether he was the

IRELAND

1887

239

same Mr. Blunt whose name had been printed on the handbills
as calling the meeting, and informed him that he was Division
Magistrate Byrne, that the meeting was illegal, and that it was
his duty to prevent it. Blunt answered briefly, ‘it is my duty to
hold it’, and with no more ado resumed his speech. He had
uttered no more than three words, ‘Men of Galway!’ when a
rush was made at him from behind and, with the whole group
of dignitaries except Father Coen, he was pushed off the plat-
form by Byrne and his satellites.

The constables began batoning the crowd. Seeing the
platform unguarded, Blunt, followed by Lady Anne, hastily
mounted and began to speak again, although everyone was too
busy to listen. A ‘pushing match’ ensued between Blunt and
Byrne while Blunt continued to speak. Byrne was obliged to
call for help. Seven or eight constables ran back and, laying
hold of Blunt, dragged him to the edge of the platform and, again,
they all toppled off, fortunately, only four feet to the ground.

Being prepared for all this, Blunt did not lose his temper;
nor had he much to complain of in the way of undue violence
shown towards himself by the constables. ‘Byrne alone among
them,’ Blunt wrote afterwards, ‘was brutal, and towards Lady
Anne . . . Anne had during the whole affair obstinately clung
to me, and he, seizing her from behind by the throat, hurt her
considerably in his attempts to drag her off. Once on the
grass and in their hands, I lay there passive, while Anne, who
thought me injured, adjured them to stand off; and they would
have let me go had I been so minded. But my mind was now
made up to push things to their ultimate issue and force them
to arrest me, and while they were hesitating what to do I
jumped to my feet and facing a band of them drawn up
in front of us, I shouted suddenly: “Are you all such damned
cowards that not one of you dares arrest me?” It had the
desired effect, and one of them, Sergeant Wade, thereupon
came forward and, laying his hand on my shoulder, arrested
me. “It is all right now,” I whispered to Anne. “Come
along.” And so, they marched us off.’

2 4 o WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1887

All was not over, however, On leaving the field, the pea-
sants began to throw stones and the constables, when one of
them was hit, made a baton charge in the street on the way
to the Court House. Keary got knocked over the head and
Roche, who defended himself with a blackthorn, was arrested.
But Frere and the Scots Guards were not called upon.

That evening Blunt was ‘brought up with Roche before a
local J.P., charged with resisting the police,’ was committed,
and offered bail on condition that he would hold no further
meeting that night. This he refused ‘on the ground that the
proclamation had been irregularly drawn, it having been stated
in it that certain informations had been sworn as to the intended
meeting which were “false, perjured, and untrue”, and so was
in itself invalid’. Whether this was good law Blunt did not
know, but it was rejected as a reason and he was ordered to
be sent to Loughrea and lodged there with Roche that night
in gaol.

5

The story of the night’s drive to Loughrea is a lurid one of
demonstrations of sympathy, bonfires, torchlight processions,
large rocks rolled into the roadway, throngs pressing up to the
doors of the brougham to seize the prisoner’s hands and curse
the constables. It culminated as they neared the prison doors:
Blunt saw a man from the crowd spring like a wild-cat on the
the box-seat and, quick as lightning strike the constable who
was driving them a blow, as Blunt thought, with a stone — it
was really a dagger — and disappear into the night. Inside the
prison those in charge questioned Blunt about this attack, but
‘the morality of the gaol’, he wrote, ‘had already claimed me
from the simplicity of truth, and I denied stoutly having seen
anything’. A great feeling of peace descended on him; his
responsibility was over; he wished only for sleep.

Two removable magistrates, ‘amateurs of the law’, were

IRELAND

1887

241

set to try Blunt’s case, one, a Limerick grocer, and the other,
‘a decayed racing man, who, on the very day on which he was
sentencing me was having judgment delivered against himself
for debt in the Court of the Queen’s Bench’. ‘They were
entirely ignorant,’ wrote Blunt, ‘yet the case they were set to
try was one of extreme constitutional complexity, needing high
magisterial ability.’ The only evidence adduced against Blunt
in court was the testimony of the police that resistance had
been shown. After declaring the Proclamation to have been
issued under the Crimes Act and finding that decision to be
untenable, the two magistrates fell back on a reference to the
Common Law, and in the end gave judgment on the astonish-
ing ground that ‘all resistance to the police was unlawful’.
They refused cross summonses against Byrne and the police
and against Balfour as representing the Dublin executive, and
sentenced Blunt to two months’ imprisonment — leaving it
doubtful whether with or without hard labour — ‘subject only
to appeal to Quarter Sessions’. Blunt appealed and was
released on bail.

That night Lady Anne and Blunt stopped with Dr. Duggan,
who to Blunt’s elation hailed him as a martyr. Outside the
palace gates the town and country people gathered in a
surging torchlit crowd. The bishop, ‘casting prudence to the
winds, addressed them from the steps in words’ which had,
Blunt fancied, ‘seldom been uttered in such strength on any
occasion by episcopal lips’.

Blunt’s first act on returning to London was to consult Sir
Charles Russell, ‘the greatest luminary at that time of the
legal world, and the lawyer most trusted by Gladstone and
the Liberal Party’. Reviewing Blunt’s written statement of the
case, which included the text of the Proclamation and the text
of his letters to Byrne and Frere, Sir Charles Russell pro-
nounced Blunt’s ‘attitude and action in the affair to have been
a perfectly correct one’, and his letters ‘in entire accordance
with the maxims of the Common Law’. This opinion was
embodied some days later in a document signed by Sir Charles

Q

242 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1887

Russell, H. H. Asquith (later Prime Minister and Earl of
Oxford and Asquith), Robert Reid (later Lord Chancellor
Loreburn) and W. S. Robson (later Attorney-General and
Lord Robson) — all of them Queen’s Counsels and M.P.s.
Blunt also told the tale of his adventure and submitted to
cross-questioning at a public meeting under the chairmanship
of Schnadhorst, chief organizer of the Liberal caucus. He stood
the test to the entire satisfaction of the audience who ‘formally
acknowledged me as having rendered good service to the
Liberal Party and the cause of Home Rule’. In a moment
Blunt had become a political lion.

Of expressions of sympathy from many friends on the news
of his arrest, none was more welcome that than from Lord
Randolph Churchill ‘who took public occasion to say some
pleasant words’ in Blunt’s favour, even though they were
parted politically. Blunt’s undergraduate friends at Oxford
wired him their congratulations; and at Cambridge Herbert
Vivian, aged about twenty, announced his secession from the
Tory Party, a conversion which to Blunt’s amusement was
‘accepted as a serious political event by the Daily News'. Blunt’s
cousin, George Shaw-Lefevre, later Lord Eversley, a strong
Gladstonian and Home Ruler among the front bench Liberals,
took up his cause with great vigour, continuing to uphold him
even when rough weather came. W. J. Evelyn of Wotton in-
sisted upon vacating his Deptford seat in order that Blunt might
stand for it. Sir William Harcourt, with whom Blunt was not
yet personally acquainted, asked him to join him in a tour of
the North of England.

The touring party was an amusing one: ‘Harcourt himself
a sympathetic and jovial personality was the best of good
company . . . and he and I’, Blunt wrote, ‘speedily made
friends, and remained so I am glad to remember, for many
pleasant years until his death. . . . Thorold Rogers was another
of our company, a story-teller, too, but of a less pleasant order ;
and for some nights we enjoyed the companionship of that
prince of humorists, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, whose role it was

IRELAND

1887-1888

243

on one or two occasions to introduce me to his constitutents
as “a convicted lawbreaker”, and “criminal under Mr. Bal-
four’s Act”.’ As ‘Balfour’s Criminal,’ Blunt was received
everywhere with enthusiasm, and enjoyed ‘a short-lived popu-
larity as such entirely at variance’, he wrote, ‘with the general
experience of my public life, but which Harcourt declared to
be for the moment “second only to Gladstone’s”.’

CHAPTER XII

BALFOUR’S PRISONER

i

Early in the new year, 1888, Blunt left London to surrender
to his bail at Portumna, County Galway, half hoping that he
would lose his case, for he dreaded being free to canvass
Deptford. In his ignorance he thought that ‘as a first-class
misdemeanant with leave to edit a new volume of poems’, he
would be ‘absolutely happy’. He went fortified against the
extremities of prison treatment ‘by a double recommendation,
temporal and spiritual’ : Sir Andrew Clark, Gladstone’s medical
adviser and privileged friend, had ‘thumped and sounded’ him
and given him a letter of hygienic advice to be handed, when
the time came, to the prison doctor; Cardinal Manning had
bestowed upon him his archiepiscopal blessing and promised
if the worst befell he would travel to Ireland to see him; and
he was accompanied to the trial by a host of friends, both men
and women. All the London newspapers reported it as an
event of importance because, if the sentence were reversed on
appeal, Balfour would lose credit even with his own side,
where there were so many anti-coercionists. It ‘was a test case
by which the success or failure of Lord Salisbury’s plan of
“twenty years of resolute government” and his nephew’s
Coercion Act would be gauged’.

A few days before the trial the Blunts learned from Lady
Alice Gaisford that Lord Salisbury had said to her that he
thought they could not imprison Blunt, as the Woodford
meeting could not be proved illegal, and ‘in reply to her further
question as to the Proclamation had explained, “Oh that was
to amuse Arthur Balfour”.’ Blunt’s Irish advisers, on the

*44

i 8 8 8

BALFOUR’S PRISONER

HS

other hand, said that, law or no law, the sentence would be
confirmed: Mr. Justice Henn, a County Court judge, em-
powered under the Crimes Act to decide without a jury, was
to try the case and would do what the Chief Secretary ordered
him ; evidence or lack of evidence would carry no weight. The
only shadow of doubt on the result was whether the authorities
at Dublin would push a case, ‘so doubtful a one in law, to an
extreme issue’.

The trial lasted for the better part of a week. Tim Harring-
ton and The Macdermot — ‘capital fellows both, who gave
their services gratis, but not for that the less ably’ — were
counsel for the defence. They could make no headway; it
was clear from the beginning that Mr. Justice Henn had
determined on a conviction; and the imposition of the
full sentence of an ordinary prisoner was delivered on the
fifth day. ‘For the first time in the affair,’ Blunt wrote, ‘I
recognized that I had a possibly serious fight before me, with
incidents deserving good Dr. Duggan’s name of martyrdom.
It was an inspiriting thought which lightened that dark
January afternoon.’

Blunt’s journey by train to the County gaol at Galway had
to be made under strong escort, for the whole countryside was
in an uproar, not far from revolt, and trouble was apprehended.
‘By an act of grace,’ Lady Anne was allowed to go with him
to Galway and, he said afterwards, ‘it was a strange and
emotional sensation to find ourselves the object of passionate
regard and demonstrative affection among a people embittered
against us by centuries of wrong-doing. . . . Once more the
thought surged strongly in me of how noble a thing it was
that I should have been called to suffer something, however
little, of ignominy and pain in expiation of my country’s crime.
Let who will count this as an exaggeration of vanity, it was
not such that day.’

Blunt’s feeling is recorded in the sonnet ‘From Caiaphas to
Pilate I was sent’ that appeared in the thin volume of Irish
poems published in 1889. Although the volume contains ‘The

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1888

246

Canon of Augrim’, ‘Remember O’Brien’ and ‘Poor Erin’, a
lament —

What have you done that men hate you so?

You have clung to your God while the rest despairing
Bowed their souls in the house of woe —

it is made up chiefly, as its title ‘ In Vinculis\ suggests, of the
sonnets composed in prison on the flyleaf of his Bible. These
Lady Gregory especially commended and to his delight
observed that she thought the portrait of Blunt which appeared
as frontispiece was ‘a libel. It looks like a villain; but that
you wouldn’t mind’.

The book is interesting but poetically not of the first water.
It is dedicated ‘to the priests and peasantry of Ireland who for
three hundred years have preserved the tradition of a righteous
war for faith and freedom’, with an acknowledgement in the
preface of Blunt’s ‘deep gratitude towards them, not for their
sympathy only, and this was great, but for much else which,
though difficult to express, will be divined in their perusal’. In
the preface he wrote also: the poems ‘record an episode in
the writer’s life to which, in spite of many austerities and some
real suffering, he cannot look back otherwise than with
affection. Imprisonment is a reality of discipline most useful
to the modern soul, lapped as it is in physical sloth and self-
indulgence’.

A prison is a convent without God.

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience
Its precepts are.

l In Vinculis’ is an important part of Blunt’s spiritual auto-
biography. It does not, of course, tell the whole story. The
actual events of his life during the years 1886—8 — all, that is, of
legitimate public interest — Blunt related in The Land War in
Ireland which he composed largely from his diary save for the
two months in prison. He was able to keep no diary in gaol
to his extreme regret since each day’s impressions there were

i 88 8

BALFOUR’S PRISONER

247

‘a curious psychological experience’. His only record was
the contraband letters scribbled on fragments of tissue paper
and conveyed by kindly warders from time to time to his
friends outside.

The English prison system in Ireland at that time denied
‘the simple amenities of pen, ink, and paper allowed in every
age and in all other countries by even the most autocratic
kings, princes and potentates to political offenders’. Without
pencil and paper he had no occupation with which to turn his
imprisonment to real spiritual profit, nothing to do but brood
and become embittered. The physical punishment is prac-
tically nothing, he wrote, but the mental punishment, the
effect of an accumulation of small indignities, ‘is a black
discipline that crushes the prisoner’s soul’.

2

Galway gaol was a rambling structure, old-fashioned, and
in so far as a gaol can be, homely — ‘not without its attraction
to an imaginative mind’. Blunt’s cell was ‘fairly well lighted,
showing a good patch of sky and the windows of the house
opposite, the gaol Governor’s, where occasional glimpses could
be had of ordinary human life and pleasure got by watching
the seagulls as they hovered overhead, and the jackdaws and
sparrows on the look out for scraps of prison food’. Discipline
was lax and the warders friendly. ‘You see, sir,’ said Denby,
Blunt’s warder, pointing to the copy of the prison rules adorn-
ing the walls of the cell, ‘you see, sir, these regulations have
not in them much sense. They are supposed to be applied
to everyone who comes here, whoever he may be, and what-
ever may be the reason. But you will understand, sir, that
it is impossible for us warders to act up to this and not make
exceptions. . . . We are obliged to distinguish between case
and case, and it is not often we have a gentleman like you here,
but when we do we know how to consider him. Why sir, it

248

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1888

was only last year we had just such another case as your own,
a gentleman from Dublin who had had a misfortune like yours
— he had signed another gentleman’s name thinking it was
his own, and he was here with us for some months. How
was he to be sweeping out his own cell? We could not let him
do it any more than I can you; a case, sir, just like yours.’

Blunt was allowed not only to have his cell swept out each
morning by a fellow prisoner, but also to retain his own long
frieze overcoat and shoes and a rug that had accompanied
him in his travels, and to sit cross-legged on his blanket on the
floor instead of perched upright on a stool, dispensations that
enabled him to keep moderately comfortable and to imagine
himself stormbound in his tent in the desert. Even the chief
warder relaxed discipline sufficiently to leave with him some-
times a copy of the Freeman ; and the Governor of the gaol
would prolong his daily visit to a quarter of an hour to give
Blunt the news, somewhat bowdlerized for prison consump-
tion, but still news.

With these slight mitigations, his early days in prison were
spent happily enough, occupied with the hard labour of picking
oakum — which he liked doing sufficiently well to hide a bit
of rope’s end on Saturday night to pick on Sundays when
penal labour was forbidden — and in reading the Old Testa-
ment. The regulation prison Bible was well nigh illegible ow-
ing to its small print, but the Bishop of the Diocese not only
availed himself of his right of entrance to visit Blunt daily
with ‘little consolations of snuff’ but used his prestige to obtain
for him a good quarto volume of the Douay Bible and with it
the Imitatio Chris ti. In the Old Testament he found much
political solace, in ‘its violences of malediction on the oppressors
and its obstinate faith in God’s ultimate justice and 'His
vengeance on the unrighteous’ ; and through it he could escape
from ‘the squalid miseries’ of his ‘actual state into the free
air of the desert’.

It was not long, however, before he ceased to be capable
of passing his days contentedly for the nights began to break

WILFRID BLUNT IN PRISON DRESS

r 8 8 8 BALFOUR’S PRISONER 249

down his resistance. In January, darkness fell early and
morning came late, and during those interminable cold hours of
total blackness — for there were no lights — he lay with insuffi-
cient covering on his unyielding plank bed. With no exercise
during the day to tire him, he was able to sleep for only one
or two hours. The prison clock, striking nine in the evening,
woke him, and he passed the remainder of the night in restless
brooding. ‘A very few of such blank nights were enough to
affect my mental balance.’ He began to lose his sense of
proportion and little matters annoyed him and preyed upon
his mind.

Soon a very real grievance cropped up. News of Blunt’s
having been seen in his own great coat reached the Prison
Board at Dublin and the Governor of the gaol, who had been
admonished for the irregularity, began systematically to try
to persuade him to give up his greatcoat and his carpet for
the regulation short round jacket and prison blanket. Con-
sidering the prison garb inadequate, Blunt consistently refused.
On January 1 3 th the dispute came to a head. Blunt’s coat was
taken by force. As he was entitled to do, he demanded to see
the visiting justices the next morning to explain his case.

The memory of his conversation with Balfour about letting
Dillon die in prison had begun to work on his mind. He had
heard that O’Brien and John Roche had been arrested again,
and he determined ‘in order to obtain humaner treatment for
all political prisoners’, to fortify his complaint of the violence
resorted to in his own case by repeating to the justices the
words Balfour had used to him four months before at Clouds,
words that now seemed to him ‘likely to be fulfilled in their
literal meaning’, if not towards himself, towards others.

Robed only in the blanket from his plank bed, Blunt
appeared to make his deposition. Somewhat to his surprise
the justices seemed for the most part to be sympathetic, owing,
Blunt deduced, to the fact that Lord Clanricarde was almost
as unpopular among his own landlord class in Galway, to
which the justices belonged, as with his Woodford tenants,

250 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1888

for they felt that he had brought discredit on them. And ‘they
found it wrong that a man of their own rank in life, a squire
and owner of broad acres, should be treated with less than the
respect due to him as such, even in prison’. They knew of
Blunt as a breeder of horses and looked upon his action at
Woodford as an eccentricity almost of a sporting character,
such as one of themselves might have indulged in in a gay
moment. Strongest of all, perhaps, in his favour, Blunt
thought, was an appeal made to some of them by Lady
Gregory, whose family — she was a Persse — was an important
one in Galway town, and whose husband, Sir William Gregory,
had been for many years member for County Galway. Lady
Gregory’s own theory, on the other hand, was that Blunt’s
charm won the Irish hearts of the justices. In any case the
effect of the hearing was to secure Blunt an overcoat exactly
like his own except that it was made of regulation material.

His action concerning Balfour’s conversation, he thought
later, ‘whether justified or not, was among the causes, perhaps
the strongest’, of the mitigation of Balfour’s severity: by the
end of the year political prisoners ‘all wore their own clothes
and were relieved from menial duties’. ‘Though my own
conscience did not wholly acquit me of hitting below the belt,
I could not regret having spoken out.’ Nevertheless, while he
was still in prison, rumours of the storm that his action had
raised in England much troubled him. Newspaper reports of
his deposition were naturally garbled since he had been
permitted neither to write it out himself nor to have it taken
down word for word. He learned that Balfour ‘denied, in the
way public men deny such things’, the accuracy of his account,
and that the social clique, of which Balfour was the centre,
and which to some extent was also his own, inveighed against
a ‘betrayal of an after-dinner conversation’. Not only Tory,
but Whig circles reproached Blunt. ‘Almost alone among the
high political people’ his cousin George Shaw-Lefevre, later
Lord Eversley, did not cease to work in Blunt’s behalf. What
worried and depressed Blunt particularly was the fact that his

i 8 8 8 BALFOUR’S PRISONER 251

own nearest relations, the Wyndhams, blamed him most
severely. He was anxious also about his Deptford candidature,
which, he felt, demanded that he should make some rejoinder.
But the letter that he managed to write and have conveyed to
his ‘ever loyal friend Evelyn’ for some reason or other was
not published . 1

3

In the second week of February the civil action filed in
Blunt’s name by the Irish National League against Byrne for
assault on Blunt at Woodford, was to come on in the Dublin
Four Courts. In order that he might be at Dublin to give
evidence, Blunt was transferred, under police escort, through
demonstrations in his honour at Galway and Dublin and at
various points on the railway journey, to Kilmainham gaol.

A forbidding, up-to-date prison, Kilmainham was scienti-
fically designed for prisoners’ greater tribulation and complete
surveillance. It was built with repellent regularity of glass and
iron, and circular, ‘with a kind of conning tower’ in the centre
where the man in charge sat like a spider watching for infringe-
ments of the regulations. The officials in charge corresponded
with the building. Their attitude was that of masters towards
servants. In a grim world of ‘stupefying silence’ Blunt’s last
weeks of prison passed in black melancholy, made the denser
by the glimpses of the outer world and his friends given him
at the trial, and especially by the knowledge that just outside,
in the Viceregal Lodge, his cousins, the Wyndhams, were dis-
porting themselves gaily.

The position of George Wyndham, Balfour’s young private
secretary, was one of considerable delicacy: not only was he
Blunt’s cousin and friend but, a few months before, Blunt had
refused his request to spend a week-end at Crabbet to meet
T. P. O’Connor fearing that such a visit might compromise
Wyndham’s political position with Balfour. It troubled him

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1888

252

therefore at the time of Blunt’s arrest to find it, in allegiance
to the oppressor, ‘on the whole . . . far better not to write to
Blunt’. Now he exclaimed, ‘Wilfrid is apparently temporarily
out of his senses, but I can hardly believe he has said all that
is attributed to him’.

The trial this time was to be decided by jury. He had been
condemned in the criminal action at Portumna by a single
judge without the protection of a jury. Now in the counter-
action at Dublin before a civil court he could only succeed by
obtaining a jury’s unanimous vote. One voice against him
would give the case to the Crown. Proceedings opened on
February nth in the Court of Exchequer with the Chief
Baron Palles as judge and, as attorney-general, ‘the notorious
Peter O’Brien, better known as “Peter the Packer”, on account
of his skill in packing juries for the Government in political
prosecutions’. 2 Tim Healy, and The Macdermot again,
defended Blunt. ‘He did not take a feather out of you was
Tim Healy’s ‘encouraging word’ to Blunt after the cross-
examination. In his summing-up, the Chief Baron Palles
treated Blunt ‘as a well-meaning but ignorant Englishman who
had blundered into an illegal position . . . and had no ground
of action against the guardians of law and order if they fulfilled
their duty in using force to prevent any breach of the peace his
action might occasion’. He admitted the prisoner’s good
intention, but dwelt on his avowed approval, which he pro-
nounced ‘Criminal Conspiracy’, of the Plan of Campaign.
‘Nevertheless,’ Blunt noted later, ‘I should have certainly won
my case but for Peter the Packer, who had justified his nick-
name by a severe exercise of the right of challenging the jurors
on whom he could rely.’ Though eleven of the twelve were for
Blunt, the twelfth, a Quaker (whom Peter the Packer had
placed on the jury) stood obstinately against him. The
unanimous verdict needed could not be obtained and Blunt
was non-suited.

The feeling was fairly general that if the verdict at the trial
had gone for Blunt, establishing the legality of his action at

i 8 8 8

BALFOUR’S PRISONER

253

Woodford, not only would he have been returned to Parlia-
ment but the back of Irish coercion under the Crimes Act
would have been broken. Balfour could hardly have remained
Chief Secretary for Ireland, and things would have taken a
happier turn for Home Rule. The importance of the issue
provoked deep public interest in the trial during the five days
it lasted. Crowds cheered the van in which Blunt was daily
driven through the streets to and fro. He was the newspaper
hero of the hour and in his weak state found the position
‘strangely emotional’.

4

The deep discouragement of failure and the bitterness of
return to gaol were made more desperate a few days after the
trial by news that the Deptford election was lost. The last
twenty days of imprisonment seemed to him a whole year of
mental suffering likely to drive him mad if they had been
prolonged. He could not sleep, and for the first time in his life
found his eyesight failing and grey hairs in his beard. The
halo of martyrdom which he felt surrounding him in Galway
gaol had faded away along with his ‘little attempts at piety’
and his trust in an ultimate justice. He ceased even to look
forward to his release. The days were an endless waiting for
something that did not come, and which, when it came, he
knew would bring no pleasure.

During the trial the thought of vengeance on his political
enemies had dominated his mind, ‘engrossing as the indulgence
of a vice’ ; now he was given a slate, and he spent hours construct-
ing unpleasant anagrams of the names of those he hated —
Balfour’s in particular. In the last few days his depression
alarmed the prison doctor and orders were given to provide
him with a secular book for light reading. Unfortunately the
Chaplain chose Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the least conso-
latory of romances, as Blunt remarked, for a prisoner’s soul.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1888

254

It added to his nightmare ‘a violent sense of the injustice of
mankind and a resolve from that time forth to live my life apart
from its ungenerous ways’.

On the morning of March 6th his prison term came to an
end. He was taken, according to custom, to the Governor
of the gaol, Mr. Beer. Instead of the usual moral advice given
by the Governor to a released prisoner, Mr. Beer announced
that he and his wife had decided, in memory of Blunt’s ‘visit
to Kilmainham’, to christen their son, born the previous night,
by the prisoner’s name, Wilfrid Blunt. Blunt replied that he
‘was much honoured’ by the Governor’s ‘appreciative choice’,
shook hands with him and retired. The prison doors were
unlocked and he found himself once more with his wife and a
group of friends in the street.

Soon after entering prison, he had written:

Here at the gate I lay down my life’s treasure,

My pride, my garments and my name with men.

The world and I henceforth shall be as twain,

No sound of me shall pierce for good or ill

These walls of grief. Nor shall I hear the vain
Laughter and tears of those who love me still.

Now he realized the full meaning of the sufferings he had but
imagined in his first exaltation, and his attitude towards life
had changed. In the last two sonnets of In Vinculis , he wrote:

Farewell, dark gaol. You hold some better hearts
Than in this savage world I thought to find. . . .

Your law is not my law, and yet my mind

Remains your debtor. It has learned to see

How dark a thing the earth would be and blind

But for the light of human charity.

I am your debtor thus and for the pang

Which touched and chastened, and the nights of

thought

Which were my years of learning. . . ,

i 8 8 8

BALFOUR’S PRISONER

2 55

If but for pride

And the high record of these days of pain,

I will not be as these, the uncrucified

Who idly live and find life’s pleasures vain.

The garment of my life is rent in twain,

Parted by love and pity.

Even yet his tribulations were not over. On his return to
London he found himself sadly unpopular among those very
Liberals who, a short month before, had been so ardent in his
favour. To add fuel to the flame he allowed Gladstone, at the
time very bitter against Balfour, to persuade him, contrary to
his better judgment, to republish the account of the Clouds
conversation and renew his charges against Balfour. Then,
‘disappointed in the truth’, which was of course less exag-
gerated than the story that had grown from Blunt’s prison
statement, Gladstone failed to support him in public.

5

With the loss of the Deptford election he lost the possibility,
at any rate in the immediate future, of entering Parliament.
Though seats here and there were offered to him, it was fairly
obvious that he could not hope to win an English seat, and he
refused to contest an Irish one. Parnell had failed to uphold
him in his struggle against Balfour and the Crimes Act and,
alone of all the Irish leaders, gave him no sign of sympathy on
his return from prison . 3 Yet Blunt paid generous tribute in
The Land War in Ireland to Parnell’s courage and value to
Ireland. When the ‘great crash’ came his analysis of Parnell’s
character and the causes of the tragedy was singularly perspica-
cious, his judgment, just but merciful.

Before abandoning the Irish stage, Blunt paid his debts of
gratitude for Irish kindnesses, and carried out his promise to
see his friends Dillon and O’Brien through their trials and

256 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1888

imprisonments. His advice concerning the Papal Rescript
condemning the Plan of Campaign and his work as ‘liaison
officer’ in informing Gladstone and Cardinal Manning and the
Irish leaders of each other’s opinion, were of considerable
value. But his two tours in May and June when he revisited
the places associated with his imprisonment, made many
speeches and was feted as ‘a new liberator’, were of little
public importance. It was with some relief that he turned
away from Irish affairs. He continued in occasional touch with
the Irish leaders, but not for many years did he render them
further service and not till 1912 did he write and publish his
account of his Irish experience in The Land War in Ireland.

Quite apart from its material, The Land W arin Ireland is an
impressive book. Written neither in the heat of battle nor as a
counterblast to misrepresentations, it is not controversial in
tone. With sufficient astringency to give it edge, it contains
none of those outbursts of personal spleen which sometimes
mar Blunt’s Egyptian and Indian memoirs. Blunt seems to
have gained a perspective on the actors, including himself,
and the remote events of two decades before, that enabled him
to write of them dispassionately. Even gruelling experiences,
though not minimized, are lightened by the wit and humour
with which they are touched.

CHAPTER XIII

REHABILITATION

i

Heretofore, though Blunt may have been politically
anathema, he had remained on good terms with his world.
But the culmination of his political excess in Ireland, the
revelation of a private talk, whether justified or not, had broken
a cardinal convention — the strict separation of private from
public life. For this sin against their code some of his friends
punished him during the following year by what amounted
to ostracism.

Without doubt he had derived in the past a certain enjoy-
ment from scoldings and snubbings — which is not to. say that
his political action was not born of profound conviction — but
to lose caste with his peers offended his pride and vanity, and
left him extremely lonely. There were many who were ready
to praise him for his Irish adventure, eager to be associated
with him, but the majority of these did not belong to his own
set. And more than most men he was dependent upon friend-
ship. Half unconsciously he devoted the next years, the last de-
cade of the nineteenth century, to re-establishing his position.
At the end, to his professed surprise he was ‘almost popular’.

Political activities, for the time being, were not practicable
as a resource, although they were to become so again in a year
or two,' particularly in Egypt. Indeed, they had ' lost their
savour through his sense of failure in ‘pleading the cause of
the backward nations of the world’ and the knowledge that he
was regarded as politically a beaten man. In 1888, too, ‘an
unfortunate family quarrel’, the first of a lohg series, added to
his bitterness in regard to the public situation.

r 257

258 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1888

The things I love have all grown wearisome;

The things that loved me are estranged or dead.

I have a house most fair, but tenanted
With shadows only, gardens of tall trees.

Fenced in and made secure from every dread
But this one terror, my soul’s lack of ease.

I have much wealth of pleasure, horse and hound

Woods broad for sport, and fields that are my own,
With neighbours of good cheer to greet me round,

And servants tried by whom my will is done.

Here all things live at peace in this dear place
All but my pride, which goes companionless.

The first summer after the Irish episode he spent in breed-
ing Arab horses, in writing verse, and — as far as was possible
when haunted by ‘vain regrets and hopes made void’ — in
enjoying his ‘physical life in the green Sussex woods as in
former days’. In the autumn his thoughts turned with longing
to his garden in Egypt —

There we may forget
All but the presence of the blessed sun.

There in our tents well-housed, sublimely set
Under a pyramid, with horse and gun,

We may make terms with nature and, awhile,

Put as it were our souls to grass, and run
Barefooted and barehearted in the smile
Of that long summer which still girds the Nile.

The first step on the way was taken in November, to Paris,
where through Lady Carlisle he had an interview, an account
of which he published in The Times , with General Boulanger,
whose integrity and ability impressed him. He made acquaint-
ance with the Socialist Louise Michel who presented him
with the manuscript of one of her poems and failed to see
why he, who had been in prison in Ireland, was not eager to
attend a Socialist meeting in Paris : ‘Why should he hesitate’,

REHABILITATION

1888-1889

259

she asked, ‘there will be no danger, we shall all have
revolvers?’ ‘I like the woman,’ Blunt observed, ‘as she is
evidently honest and of an unselfish nature.’

From France he went with Lady Anne, en route to Alex-
andria, to pay a long-promised visit to her cousins, the Noels,
in Greece. Since he had last been at Athens — as an attache,
thirty years before — the picturesqueness of King Otto’s court
and of unmodernized Athenian life had disappeared. Worse
still, the splendid old Venetian walls of the Acropolis had been
pulled down and the beauty of Mycenae had been destroyed
by Schliemann’s excavations. Blunt had no sympathy with
reconstructing past ages, infinitely preferring monuments
encrusted, however anomalously, by time. The wonders of the
Corinthian canal and railway journeys instead of mountain
rides hardly compensated for what was lost. Happily Nauplia,
pale gold and pink on its bright blue bay, and the other
villages where he was put up by Greek friends of the Noels,
had been left untouched. Life in the small stucco houses
beneath dilapidated trees continued as of old, leisurely and
teeming. And Euboea itself, with the new generation of Noels,
whom he had known as children in his attache days, was much
as it had been, with the added charm of remembered gaiety.

During his first months in Egypt Blunt refrained from
meddling in any way in politics ; he still felt under obligation
to Lord Salisbury to avoid showing his sympathy with the
Nationalists publicly, and he was quite content to occupy him-
self with his horses and the garden of Sheykh Obeyd.

In the early nineteenth century the garden had been pur-
chased by the Viceroy Ibrahim from the Imam of his Arabian
army. He enclosed thirty-three acres within walls, dug
sakiehs to irrigate them and, having ‘a passion for laying out
gardens’, planted them as they were to be found in Blunt’s
time. He had spared no expense. Trees had been brought
from Taif in the Hejaz and from Syria whose fruit fetched
a yearly revenue of £%oo. The pomegranates, so large that
only thirty went to a camel load, were worthy of being sent

260

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

1888-1889

yearly from the Viceroy to the Sultan at Constantinople. Later,
when Tewfik lived at Koubba during his father Ismail’s reign,
the ladies of his harem were carried each Friday to the garden
to spend the day listening to its running waters and eating
sweetmeats in its cool shade. The ruin of Ismail’s fortune in
1879 put an end to all such pleasuring and the garden came
into the hands of the Domains Commission from which Blunt
had bought it.

But the garden suffered during the Nationalist uprising and
again during Blunt’s imprisonment in Ireland when the care-
takers imagined that his career was over and they might treat
the garden as their own, ‘economizing the cost of its watering
and using it as a run for their cattle’. To restore it was for
Blunt a labour of love. In 1888, leaving his family at Cairo,
he spent many weeks at Sheykh Obeyd pruning the trees with
a pair of garden nippers and superintending work on the
garden. It was seeded, dug twice and restocked with young
orange plants ; the irrigation engine was mended and watering
begun regularly. Soon the place grew lush again and had a
kempt air of remote and happy peace.

He arranged the house also, the old gardener’s house of
four rooms and an open selamlik as sitting-room. The floors
were covered in the fashion of Nejd with two inches of clean
white sand over which carpets were spread, and furniture — at
first consisting only of a divan and a table made of square
chicken-coops — was constructed by the village carpenter of
palm branches newly cut from the garden. Blunt’s own room
was ‘like a lantern with windows facing east, north and west’,
and from his bed he could see ‘the first glimmer of false
dawn’ that made the owls hoot and the jackals cry.

At the beginning of the real dawn he rode outside the wall
to the desert’s edge to await the sunrise and watch the animals
and birds. He gave orders, always strictly kept, that all animals,
even wolves, should be unmolested within the garden. 1 The
foxes soon became so tame that they came sometimes within
a few yards of his feet, playing and rolling over each other,

LADY ANNE BLUNT

REHABILITATION

261

1888-1889

unafraid since he wore Arab dress like the workpeople to whom
they were used. And the trees were full of birds. It was a
wrench, as it always proved to be, to leave in the spring soon
after the Mowled of Sheykh Obeyd, the annual religious
festival when a calf for the labourers and a sheep for the
sheykhs were killed, and games and recitations and chantings
were held in honour of the birthday of the Saint, at his tomb
in the garden.

On his return to England Blunt’s re-establishment in society
began chiefly by way of literary work. He started the long
poem, ‘the Wisdom of Merlyn’, a ‘book of maxims’, on which
he laboured intermittently for many years though he did not
print it until 1914. He wrote two pastoral poems, ‘Worth
Forest’ in rhymed couplets incorporating bits of verse done
as early as 1865, and l Sed Nos Qui Vivimus', which, like the
four poems ‘From the Arabic’ that were composed at this
time, is an experiment in assonance. These he published in
1889 together with the sonnet sequence, ‘A New Pilgrimage’
and several fairly long poems written earlier, during his
‘Proteus period’. ‘A New Pilgrimage’ recounts his journey
in 1886—7 through France and Switzerland to Rome, and
gives its title to the volume. 2

As poetry the book is impressive only for its facility and the
care with which the theories put forward in the Preface in
regard to the sonnet form are observed. But it has a certain
importance because of the impression it conveys of Blunt’s zest
for life.

I love things that are young and happy and eternal,

Eternal in their change and growth as I too changing grow.

Old am I, and how many voices that I loved are heard not !

Yet the world lives, and in its life I live and laugh and
love.

The variety of experience recorded in the volume is astonish-
ing. He wrote with keen enjoyment of trout fishing, of fox-
hunting and partridge-shooting, of a day of tennis at Hampton

262 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1889

Court, of watching ‘the worshippers at fashion’s shrine’ in
London in the month of May. He

would not for a million not have seen
Fred Archer finish upon Guinevere.

He cherished recollections of gambling at Monaco; of the
rapture of lying again in ‘a Christian bed’ after the journey
across the Pampas ; of

the unlimited fields revealed of grey Arabian desert,
Where are no streams or shade, but only the blind haze

of noon;

of an Indian city, ‘strange, wonderful and vast’. Almost every
aspect of nature intrigued him — perhaps in part because he
read into nature an ironic spirit which baffled while it delighted
him:

Earth has a silent mockery which repels our questioning.

Most characteristic of all is his love for his own land,

How dare I not rejoice who thus its king in Eden reign?

He liked to count the generations who had built up his
estates — ‘the Sussex clod’, ‘worthy master Gale, our house’s
founder’, and those that followed.

That which they did I do. In me they live unvan-
quished.

My voice is theirs to-day, my step their step, my soul

their soul.

For them I live ungrieving, and ungrieved their fruit I

gather

From trees they planted bravely in their pride of life and

time.

They fashioned these old gardens. Let my soul their

joy inherit,

Their passion heaped on passion, life on life, for my

life’s prize.

REHABILITATION

1889

263

‘Worth Forest’, in which he dwells fondly on each feature of
his countryside, expresses his bitterness for the loss of the
son who would have carried on ‘the guardianship of this
domain’.

Blunt was at last ready to admit himself a poet. He had
come to feel it not merely one of the accomplishments of a
gentleman but a serious occupation to write the ‘tale of tran-
sient things’ his eyes had seen, his ears had heard. He would
carve his thought,

clean cut and plain of meaning,
Marble made life, with sinewy phrase and knotted
argument.

For he had grown to believe that he would be ‘a traitor’ if he
let these things vanish unrecorded.

An influence in turning him at this time to poetry was his
friendship with William Morris, his first intimate acquaintance
with a member of a professedly literary or artistic group.
He had known Mrs. Morris for some years but not until
he paid a visit to Kelmscott Manor in 1889 did he and
Morris become friends, drawn together because, as Blunt put
it, they had both sacrificed much socially to their principles,
their principles had failed to justify themselves by results and
they were both ‘driven back on earlier loves, art, poetry,
romance’. Morris’s independence, his success in establishing
a way of life perfectly satisfactory to himself, his absorption
in his work and his mastery of multifarious crafts, were titles
to Blunt’s admiration. He felt, unconsciously perhaps, some-
thing of the condescension of the man of the world for the
professional; nevertheless, he was profoundly interested in
discussing matters literary and artistic and political with a
man who knew whereof he spoke. He felt too, that he under-
stood how to talk with Morris, that he was able to give him
information and to draw him out to express his own views.
He liked what he called Morris’s ‘impersonality’, the fact that
he was no respecter of persons. It was pleasant to have him

264 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1889-1890

shout peremptorily, ‘Damn it, Blunt, take an oar’, while they
were fishing together for gudgeon in the Thames. Whatever
Morris’s feeling towards him may have been — and Blunt
knew that he really cared only for a few lifelong friends —
Blunt looked upon Morris with both affection and admiration,
doing all he could to cheer him through his final illness in
1896 and, for his sake as well as hers, showing much kindness
to Mrs. Morris and her younger daughter after his death.

By 1889, Blunt’s daughter, Judith, later Lady Wentworth,
was emerging from childhood and was to be launched in
society. The fact that they were in many ways alike tempera-
mentally, as well as in appearance, formed a bond of personal
devotion which made their estrangement, when it came a few
years afterwards, all the more bitter. Blunt spoke prophetically
when he wrote in the last stanza ‘To Hester on The Stair’:

Be it so. My love you mock it,

And my sighs are empty wind.

See, I shut my heart and lock it

From your laughing eyes unkind.

Yet, remember this last word
Love is two-edged like a sword.

Mind this only, only mind!

Not long before, he had remarked to a friend: ‘You don’t
know what it is to be the father of an only daughter, so you
will not understand how I am wrapped up in the child. She
is the only person I feel afraid of, and I suppose that is the
reason.’ And although he did not attend many of her balls
and parties, the process of her d^but provided him with a new
absorbing interest and the brilliance of her beauty and wit
gave him deep satisfaction.

Nevertheless the old desire to be off to Egypt came upon
him as it did each autumn. Happily at Cairo he found that
time had softened the antipathy of Government officials there
towards him. Prince Wagram, who had followed the Blunts
to Egypt in December, brought an informal message to him

REHABILITATION

1890

265

to the effect that Baring would like to see him, and he was
advised by his native friends that a rapprochement would
strengthen his opportunities of influence by removing people’s
fear in calling on him of the Resident’s displeasure.

The interview was a successful opening for future association
and marked, as Blunt himself noted, a definite, if temporary,
softening in his attitude towards Baring and the British
Occupation. Although he could make no headway on the
subject of Arabi’s recall to Egypt — most of the exiles had been
permitted to return — he was able to discuss with the Resident,
as he continued to do with good effect for the next ten years
or so, many questions of immediate practical interest.

Blunt’s heated partisanship had cooled and he took Egyptian
politics less personally: ‘For the first time in my life, I think,
this winter I have been absolutely and entirely happy. The
feeling that I have finished with the vain European life of fret
and worry never leaves me and is like the dressing-gown and
slippers one puts on after a day’s hunting and finds the best
part of the sport. I have come exactly to the point where I
was ten years ago when the East was a romance to me and not
a “sphere of influence”, and I am able to enjoy it better now,
having ransacked the other treasures of life.’

The story was much the same in England in the spring.
His political sins had faded from the minds of his friends;
time and the turn of events had assuaged their outraged
feelings. He was, after all, a most fascinating member of their
own set, whose escapades might be overlooked since dis-
pleasure with their more eccentric manifestations had been
duly registered. So they began to return to him — Lytton,
first, and his cousin George Wyndham, who had written him
friendly letters the previous winter. Wyndham strove to make
things pleasant for him, arranging meetings at his house in
Park Lane with their common friends, and eventually, even
one with Arthur Balfour. It considerably restored Blunt’s
confidence, in view of the difficulties over prison garb, to lend
Balfour on a chilly evening his own topcoat.

2 66 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1892

To his women friends Blunt found that his prison adventures
had become a title to romantic interest, which made it easy
for him to resume his place in society. Blunt’s relations with
women form the background of his life from first to last and
for obvious reasons were highly important to him during
this period of rehabilitation. He was fastidious and not
exceptionally passionate, but love affairs were part of the social
game in which his charm and good looks gave him the advan-
tage. Victory won, his vanity was satisfied and lasting friend-
ship was often the result.

The two summers after their rapprochement he spent
chiefly with Lytton at the Embassy in Paris, the scene of so
much of his diplomatic youth in the days of Lord Cowley
and the Second Empire. They talked of literature, ‘more
especially of dramatic literature’, with which Lytton just then
was occupied; and Lytton, older than Blunt by nine years and
‘already entering that valley of the shadow of old age from
which he was never to emerge’ confided his sorrows to Blunt.
The summer of 1890 would have been one of the most
delightful in Blunt’s experience had it not been darkened by
the death of his cousin ‘Bitters’, Francis Currie, the mentor
of his youth at Paris and his constant friend.

The next year Lytton himself became desperately ill.
When Blunt was taken into the room where he lay in bed to say
good-bye before going south to Egypt in mid-November, 1891,
he knew that the farewell might be their last. A few weeks
later a telegram reached him at Fogliano saying that his friend
had died. ‘His death’, wrote Blunt long afterwards, ‘was a
loss I can hardly estimate, and to many more than me, for by
the public in Paris it was looked on as a State calamity. . . .
It was not merely that Lytton was popular, but he was
beloved.’ In April Blunt paid his public tribute to their
friendship in an article in the Nineteenth Century, ‘Lord Lytton’s
Rank in Literature’, that gave incidentally his reminiscences
of their first meeting and their months together at Cintra.

I 890-1 898

REHABILITATION

267

2

Outwardly Blunt’s life for the next six years runs as
usual, the winters in Egypt and the summers in England.
But beneath the surface of his social relations new depths are
discernible — more conscious stress is laid upon friendship.
Now that his intimate circle had been shattered by the death
of two lifelong friends, probably without fully realizing it he
set about welding more firmly other relationships which had
been re-established during the past two years. He well under-
stood their value.

Love seeks its price, but friendship has a fashion
Larger to give, and of less selfish plan.

No one had to a greater degree the gifts that make old friends
seek one out; but also no one took more assiduous pains than
he to keep up with friends. When he was an old man, he
wrote, ‘experience all is of use, save one, to have angered a
friend’.

Every August he went on a driving tour partly for the fun
of the driving and sightseeing, but chiefly for the sake of
looking up his friends. He drove his Arabs swiftly across the
Berkshire Downs to visit Morris at Kelmscott Manor, travel-
ling over grass through ‘a quite uninhabited country as desolate
as parts of Mesopotamia, and in the bright sunlight very
beautiful, coveys of young partridges running here and there
tamely in front of the carriage’. Then on to his cousins the
Elchos at Stanway where he had an agreeable time with his
fellow guest, Arthur Balfour.

Or he drove his cousin Lord Alfred Douglas to Stratford
and continued alone again to Kelmscott where he tried
unavailingly to prove to Morris ‘that he and Ruskin had done
more harm than good by their attempt to make English people
love beauty and decorate their architecture’. On to Stone-
henge, about which he wrote: I went at midnight ‘in full

268 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

solitude to the stones and spent an hour there alone, making
incantations in the hope of raising some ghost of ancient
times, but in vain, and though I repeated the Lord’s Prayer
backwards, nothing would come. Perhaps it was the fact
that in order to do so without a book I had first to repeat each
sentence in its natural sequence, and this may have neutralized
the spell. Then I lay down under one of the fallen blocks
and dozed off for an hour or two, but still nothing. Stonehenge
has much in common with primitive Egypt.’ Finally he drove
homewards by way of Twyford on the Itchen, the scene of his
early but unforgotten sufferings.

Three years later he passed Stonehenge again, on the way
to the West of England and South Wales. This time he
stopped at Wilton where he found Sidney Herbert, later
Lord Pembroke, with his family of boys at cricket, much as
he had found former generations, thirty years before: ‘Wilton’,
he said, ‘is the paradise of England with its three rivers,
eternally beautiful and unchanged while its owners change
and perish. One passes by and finds Herberts living there,
happily idling their lives away, as one finds swallows year after
year nesting in a village, and one imagines them to be the
same Herberts, as one imagines the others to be the same
swallows.’

In 1896 he stopped the first few nights of his tour at
Oldhouse in the New Forest with Auberon Herbert who,
grown more beautiful and more ethereal, but also ‘more
flighty than he used to be’, was living a vegetarian life beset
by draughts. Then on to his friends the Horners at Mells,
‘a comfortable eighteenth-century house, remote and shut in,
which gives a sense of immemorial quiet screened from the
world’s view’.

A few weeks after the annual driving tour Blunt sometimes
made a series of family visits to Scotland, stopping on the way
southward with the Tennants at The Glen ; or he went for a fort-
night’s grouse shooting at Castle Menzies with the Wagrams.
There he made friends with the Austrian Count MensdorfiF

1890-1898 REHABILITATION 269

and with the Comte and Comtesse de Paris and the French
Royalists — the Broglies, the Jan courts, the Hautpouls — who
were paying court to the ‘worthy Pretenders’. His friendship
with ‘the flower of their wilderness’, the Princess Helene de
France et de Navarre, for whom he wove ‘Anthems of grief
and true love born of thy loveliness’, outlasted many years.
She was ‘a tall, very tall, slight girl of immense charm and
distinction, whom’, Blunt wrote, ‘I taught to play lawn tennis
at Castle Menzies, three years ago. She remembered it well
and was very nice to me in her greeting.’ During a fortnight
there in 1891 he saw the Pretenders several times, at a great
chasse of blue hares on Shehallion and when they came again
to Castle Menzies, ‘the little Princess looking lovely in a hat
with pink flowers’.

He paid an annual visit, too, to Prince and Princess Wagram
at Gros Bois, near Paris, with days of shooting or expeditions
— to Ferrieres and to Yaux-le-Vicomte — and evenings of good
talk and political discussion. Gros Bois itself, a royal domain,
had been an oak wood ever since the time of the Druids and
had been given repeatedly to different favourites of the Kings
of France until it was bestowed by Napoleon on Wagram’s
grandfather. The way of life there appealed to Blunt and to
some extent he carried it out on his own estates. In his diary
he wrote, ‘He [Wagram] remembers three poachers having
been shot dead at various times in the park, two by himself
and one by the keepers. In his own case the man had first
fired on him. In the third case the poacher was unarmed;
in none was any inquiry made. He and the keepers buried
the dead men quietly where they fell. The last of these three
events happened as long ago as 1863 and “Nobody”, he said,
“knows now where they lie but myself; the keepers who
helped to bury them are all dead; it has kept poachers most
effectually away. En plaine , meaning the open fields, one does
not make justice thus to oneself, but inside the park it is best
to do so and say nothing.” Wagram is a fine survival of the
old sporting days in France, against which the revolution

270 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

declaimed. . . . What is pleasant in the sport here is Wag-
ram’s familiar way with his men; they are all devoted to
him.’

Oddly enough out of this patriarchal world came, later,
Blunt’s first taste of motoring — a drive with the Princess
Wagram from Gros Bois to Paris at the exhilarating speed of
fifteen miles an hour. In England, where the roads were
narrow and winding, motors found no favour in his eyes. They
killed the quiet and fragrance and were likely to kill the
inhabitants of the Sussex countryside. He patronized them
only of necessity, his one long drive being many years later
after a serious illness when, too desperate to protest, he was
whisked from Newbuildings to Brighton by his son-in-law.
On more than one occasion he derived considerable pleasure
from the undoubted frenzy of the motorist whom he held up,
choked with dust, behind the impassable back of his carriage
as he walked his horses with deliberate slowness down a
Sussex lane.

During the year of his first motor drive, 1900, the great
International Exposition was being held at Paris. In the
Victorian Gothic Country House containing the English
exhibit, hung, among others, the tapestry after Botticelli’s
‘Spring’ made for Blunt by Morris in 189 $-6, and in the
Horse Show at Vincennes Blunt exhibited a number of Arabs.
But the tapestry did not show to advantage since the English
pavilion, in common with most of the -pavilions Etrangers, had
‘a certain vulgarity’ about it; and, although the Crabbet
horses attracted ‘many admirers of a serious kind’ and took
four medals and prizes, they did not take the higher prizes
that they should justly have won.

The autumn trip to Egypt afforded him excuse for journeys
to more distant friends. He made a great half-circle in 1895
to visit at Therapia his cousin Philip Currie, ambassador to
the Porte, and, on the way, his old friend Count Joseph
Potocki at Antonine in Poland to see his Arab stud. Thence
to Countess Branicka’s country house, Alexandrie, at Biela-

REHABILITATION

1890-1898

271

Tzerkov in the Ukraine, where life, seemly, hierarchical, full
of gusto, was again of the sort to give him pleasure.

Another autumn, Blunt went on from Gros Bois, en route
to Egypt, to pay a long-planned visit in Tunis to his cousin
Terence Bourke, a younger brother of his old ally, ‘Button’.
Blunt was delighted with his cousin’s house in the Moslem
quarter, ‘as lovely an old tile-encrusted bit of bric-a-brac as
one would wish to live in’. But he was disconcerted to find
that his Arabic was not understood by the Tunisians and that
he was obliged to depend on his cousin for the commonest
words in the Tunisian dialect. Fortunately Terence Bourke
not only talked Tunisian Arabic perfectly but had acquired,
Blunt found, an influence with the native Tunisians of all
classes, unrivalled by any other European. He had many
ideas, too, on Oriental subjects and on religion that were
sympathetic to his cousin. They made a plan of going to the
oasis of Siwah in the spring, of visiting the Senussi, a Moham-
medan sect whose headquarters were in the Tripolitan desert,
and, perhaps, making profession of Islam there. ‘I hope’,
wrote Blunt, ‘I may sometime do so — I think a hermitage of
the kind I have been seeking might be found in the country
near Cyrene.’

Meantime they started off in a landau with four horses
abreast for Kerouan, the Holy City of Tunisia. There the
cousins, in Arabian dress, passed for an Indian Moslem
merchant and his friend, a Syrian, from Damascus. The heat
was terrific so that they lay all day ‘stewing in the balcony’
playing chess. But in the evening and early morning they
sallied forth. No one suspected them of a disguise. They
were able to enter the mosques and, in those outside the town,
make their devotions, and in the evening to sit on mats under
the city walls by an Arab coffee house, drinking lemonade.
A day and a half, and they had had enough of Kerouan. They
left by the Eastern gate to take their places in the horse-drawn
train that galloped across the desolate plains in four hours to
the sea at Sus. There they parted, each taking ship, Terence

272 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

Bourke to return to Tunis, Blunt by way of Tripoli and Malta
to Egypt.

At one time or another most of Blunt’s friends came out
to Egypt and were hospitably entertained at the larger house —
like most Egyptian houses of mud with a coat of plaster on
the outside — which had been built at Sheykh Obeyd by local
workmen around a great lebbak tree. People still speak of
the delight of entering the sweet-scented coolness of the
garden, from the brilliant sun of the desert outside, and of
sitting on the roof of the house in the shade of thick branches,
talking with their host.

Visitors gathered there from the out-of-the-way places as
well as the centres of the world: sheykhs from Syria and Nejd,
Egyptian sheykhs and fellahin, French and English officials
and winter tourists in Cairo. Blunt discussed problems of all
sorts with them, parried such searching questions concerning
his political doings as ‘why do you take pleasure in making
your fellow men unhappy’, restrained the rash, urged the
dilatory to action, and advised or helped actively those who
needed aid. And little as he himself cared for monuments of
ancient civilizations he knew a great deal about them and saw
to it that his European friends visiting Egypt were properly
introduced to its great treasures.

The letters of Frederic Harrison from Sheykh Obeyd in
1895 t0 hi s family in England picture vividly the life there.
Of his arrival he wrote: ‘I found our Sheykh’s name a passport
everywhere. When I got to the station out of Cairo and
asked for a ticket for Ezbet-el-Nakle, their black faces shone
and their white teeth came out 'and they said, “Blunt?” and
when I nodded they seemed ready to carry me there. . . ;
At Nakle I found a Nubian, in fez and blue pants, with a
white (royal) donkey, richly caparisoned with tassels and
embroideries. I solemnly mounted the donkey, the Nubian
in front, and a tribe of Arab boys running behind with my
bags. We passed through a grove of palms, under which a
score of Arab mares were tethered, and at the rude stone

REHABILITATION

i 890-1 898

273

outer gate the Nubian janissary said to me, “El Sheykh!”
And there, sure enough, was Wilfrid, in an immense white
burnous, white baggy trousers, and an Arab — not Turkish —
white headdress and lapels — like the Sultan of Morocco.
I said, “Allah! Bismallah! Sheykh!” and rode in. I was
taken up a stone staircase without banister or handrail on to
the roof, shaded with lebbak trees and sycamores, and there,
lounging on a collection of cane divans, chaises longues , and
settees, we had hot fresh milk, and tea and dates.

‘The ladies adopt the Arab dress, and go about in long
flowing burnouses and oriental headdresses worn over embroi-
dered satin, looking like Roxana and Fatima. Everything is
carried on in Arab style.’ The scene seemed to Harrison ‘like
a bit of Genesis in real life’. Arab brood mares — lovely Arabs
of grey or black or bay — and their foals were tethered, feeding
down the clover, in front of the gate and outer court and were
tended by a small tribe of Bedouin lads who lived in tents under
the palms. In tents behind the house lived the house servants
and in the garden the Arab gardeners and water-carriers;
five hundred yards off was a teeming Bedouin village and still
farther out, in the actual desert, was the camel encampment
with its tribe of Bedouin. ‘Altogether’, wrote Harrison,
‘there must be at least a hundred Arabs under the paternal
rule of our Sheykh.’

‘This morning we mounted — Wilfrid looking very grand
in his burnous and turban on a fine bay. I had a dapple grey
with cocked-up tail and oriental saddle and tassels for trap-
pings; Lord E — on a white and very quick donkey — with
bare-leg seyces or runners on foot behind. We rode across
desert, water-courses, meadows, and queer tracks to Heli-
opolis, the Egyptian On. 7

In his next letter he tells of a desert trip. The Blunts often
took their guests excursions into the desert, sometimes short
jaunts to lunch or tea under a gay tent prepared for them by
their servants in some seemingly remote desert valley, some-
times longer trips such as the journey on camels in 1894

s

274 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

into the Western desert where they travelled ‘among the then
isolated monasteries of the Natron Valley, and in the great
uninhabited wilderness beyond it.’

I went with happy heart (how happy!) a while since
Behind my camel flocks,

Piping all day where the Nile pastures end
And the white sand begins
Among the rocks.

The wheeling eagles mocked me high there from the skies,
The red blast of the desert wind
Hath seared my eyes.

During his summers in England, also, Blunt received
innumerable visitors at Crabbet; among the most frequent,
Wilfrid Meynell, then editor of the Catholic paper, Merrie
England ', who brought literary gossip, long accounts of Francis
Thompson, of Cardinal Manning’s last days, and ‘of a new
movement within the body of the English Catholic clergy,
of the most revolutionary kind especially among the Capu-
chins’ — the modernist movement. But gradually Blunt began
to feel that he was overhoused at Crabbet, and to pine for
something new. In 1895, letting Crabbet for some years, he
moved towards the end of June to the comparatively small
house, Newbuildings Place.

The house itself, small, irregular, aristocratic, of grey
Sussex stone, its colour softened by age, had at once an air of
dignity and of gracious homeliness that satisfied Blunt’s taste.
On a hilltop it dominated the woods, criss-crossed with
deeply shaded rides, the farms, and the rugged oak-bordered
fields and hedged meadows of the estate. Far beyond, across
the weald, could be seen the long blue line of the Sussex
Downs with the dark jut that marked Chanctonbury Ring. 3
The place had an intimate charm: civilized and quiet, it was
yet wild and uncultivated; and though small, seemed spacious.

Blunt thought it a delicious sort of hermitage where one
could forget the ‘worries of the world’, where the stone

REHABILITATION

1890-1898

275

floored, panelled rooms, the plain oak stair with its barred
gate at the landing, the priests’ secret hiding-places by the
end chimneys, recalled the austere, partisan, traditional life
of past centuries; and where the woods, he wrote, are ‘lovely
in green and gold, nightingales singing night and day from
every hedge, quite a dozen close to the house so that one can
hear them at any hour of the night chorusing when one opens
a window.’ His diary is jotted with this fresh pleasure in all
the sights and sounds of the place: in the bees and the butter-
flies floating intently above the attar roses brought from
Damascus and the familiar English flowers between box-edged
paths; in the yew hedge that separated the house from the
orchard and the weald; in the peacocks stepping about arro-
gantly in the sunlight; most of all in the Arab mares in their
near-by paddock.

Two years after, in the year of the Queen’s Jubilee, he found
it necessary to enlarge the house, and erected what was known
as ‘the Jubilee Room’, a two-storied building, separated a
little from the main house and used chiefly for guests. Though
— or perhaps because — it was built by a local bricklayer who
worked out the plans with Blunt step by step as the building
progressed, it toned with the old house, softening its distinct,
Jacobean outline and giving it a spreading, settled air.

Almost the highest praise that Blunt could give to a place
was that it seemed to him worthy of being the last scene he
looked upon with mortal eyes. And when he had first seen it,
long before 1895, had remarked of Newbuildings, ‘it is a
place to die in’. He was in truth to die there years later.
Meantime he found it a place well worth living in.

3

For many summers previously a group of congenial spirits
known as the Crabbet Club paid Blunt a yearly visit. The club
started as a branch of the Wilton or Wagger Club which Lord

276 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

Pembroke had founded in 1871 to bring his Eton and Oxford
friends together at Wilton for cricketing, boating, lawn tennis
and other diversions. Lord Pembroke Blunt had known
since his schooldays and in 1876 he and several members of
the Wagger Club stayed at Crabbet. They had a cricket match
and a lawn tennis handicap and Blunt ‘drove them all to
Epsom for the Derby [Silvio’s year]’. The party proved such
a success that Blunt, though ten years older than the other
members, was asked to join the Club and the next year one
of its regular meetings took place at Crabbet as it did annually
thereafter. 4

Though politics were not in question nearly all of the
members were Tories and highly disapproved of Blunt’s
political doings. From the time of his support of Egypt in
1882 through his contest for a seat in Parliament as a Home
Ruler in 1 8 8 5—6, the Crabbet meetings became increasingly
less popular until they were all but submerged by the Irish
episode in 1887. Blunt felt it natural enough that hardly any
of the old Wilton members answered his invitations and he
set about reconstructing the club on different lines with the
three members of the old group who remained faithful —
Mark Napier, Eddy Hamilton and Nigel Kingscote — and a
few younger men to fill in. Later some of the older members
such as Godfrey Webb returned to the fold.

Under Blunt’s presidency the Crabbet Club now entered
its brilliant and famous second incarnation. It took a more
intellectual turn, adding competitions in mock oratory and
extempore verses to the lawn tennis handicap. The members
drew up at the meeting in 1887 a constitution of fourteen
articles. ‘The club’, it announced, ‘is a convivial association,
which has for its object to discourage serious views of life by
holding up a constant standard of amusements.’ The members
were expected to subordinate the interests of public life ‘to the
higher interests of the club’. Anyone so misguided as to
accept a seat in the Cabinet, the Viceroyalty of India, an
Archbishopric, or an Embassy ‘must submit to re-election

REHABILITATION

1888-1898

277

before he can resume the privileges of membership’. And
anyone who married would be suspended for twelve calendar
months, since marriage, though not discountenanced, was
held to be a grave danger. Ladies, of course, were ineligible
for membership.

George Wyndham, who became a member in 1889, put
new life into the club by introducing his own young friends.
Among them, Blunt wrote, ‘were George Curzon (afterwards
Lord Curzon of Kedleston), Harry Cust, Houghton (now
Lord Crewe), Frederick Locker, Umphreville Swinburne,
cousin of the poet, St. George Lane Fox, Eddy Tennant,
Laurence Currie, George Leveson Gower, Esme Howard,
Elcho, Dick Grosvenor, Alfred Douglas, Charles Gatty,
Morpeth, and his brother Hubert Howard, and on a single
occasion Oscar Wilde.’ George Wyndham described the
meetings to Charles Gatty: ‘The occasion is a man’s party,
barring the hostess, Lady Anne Blunt: they meet to play
lawn tennis, the piano, the fool, and other instruments of
gaiety. To write bouts rimes , sonnets, and make sham orations.
. . . You will find young Radicals and Tories, amateurs of
poetry and manly sports. The president presides at dinner
in the costume of an Arab Sheykh, and produces sonnets and
shrewd observations on man and nature. The woods grow
up in virginal unconsciousness of the axe to the very door.
On one side a wilderness sown with desert plants and dotted
with wind-sown English bushes; on the other a Sussex
paddock with Arab brood-mares and their foals. Below
in the hollow a pond full of trout, on which the swans
sleep and swim lazily through the day. The house is over-
grown with June roses and the lawns after dark are very
silent and conducive to the complete and satisfactory solu-
tion of all problems, moral and aesthetic, by the active
brains of young and uninstructed men pacing in the moon-
light.’

Long afterwards Esme Howard, now Lord Howard of
Penrith, wrote of Mark Napier’s proposing him for member-

278 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

ship at one of the Saturday evening dinners: ‘I hardly know
this fellow, Esme Howard, whom I have been told to propose,
and it matters little to me whether one fool more or less joins
this club, but there is one matter which may be of great
importance to you all. It is that I have, in Westminster, a
charming little house that I want to let.’ Esme Howard then
threw himself on the mercy of the company as a Respectable
Mediocrity. Whereupon George Curzon protested, ‘in a
voice trembling with indignation’, ‘We have had, hitherto,
all sorts of people elected to the club, of whom the less said,
perhaps, the better. But we have never yet had one who laid
claim to the title of Respectable Mediocrity. A Mediocrity
I might, perhaps, a la rigueur have put up with, but a respect-
able one would be past endurance.’

On Sunday afternoon the tennis was played off and in the
evening the poems were read and more speeches made. The
company sat at table sometimes through the night and refreshed
themselves in the early June sunshine of the next morning by
a plunge in the lake before returning to London. It was all
carefree and uproarious. ‘These occasions are the salt of
life’, pronounced Blunt. ‘The poetry of the Crabbet Club’,
he added, ‘has been preserved in print, and is one of the
curiosities of literature, deserving a place, I venture to think,
in company with the best verse of a not serious kind, including
even perhaps that of the Mermaid Tavern.’ His own enjoy-
ment of the fun may have prejudiced him in favour of poems
distinguished chiefly for their high spirit and gentlemanly
facility. The wittiest of them is Curzon’s ‘Sin’ which took
the prize in 1893 and ends,

And so when some historian
Of the period Victorian

Shall crown the greatest exploit of this wonder-working age,
His eye shall light on Crabbet,

And, if truth shall be his habit,

The name of everyone of us will shine upon that page.

I 890-1 898

REHABILITATION

279

To us will be the glory
That ne’er shall fade in story,

Of reviving the old axiom that all the world’s akin,

That the true link of union
Which holds men in communion
Is frank and systematic and premeditated Sin!’

George Wyndham’s more ambitious prize poem of 1890, ‘A
Metaphisico-Pastoral Poem’, ‘In Praise of Crabbet and the
Free Fellowship of the Crabbet Club’ has grace and a wistful
charm. Two stanzas of it run,

Flight and Pursuit, this is the ceaseless round
For all who cumber life with end or aim.

Life full enough of pleasure may be found,

They have no need to complicate the game

With arbitrary rules of Right and Wrong,
Wisdom and Folly, all unworthy song.

Unworthy song, nor worth a passing thought,

Since Life alone sufficient is for theme;

Mere life — the unexplained sensations brought
By winds that blow from field and wood and

stream,

The warmth of sunlight, the kind talk of

friends,

This is a life that needs no aims and ends.

The young men of the Crabbet Club did not confine their
visits to Blunt merely to its meetings. Lord Howard tells of
another visit to Crabbet on Derby Day in the early ’nineties
when a characteristic episode occurred. Blunt drove his guests
as usual in a brake with a four-in-hand of Arab horses to
Epsom where a place was always reserved for him inside the
ring. They arrived rather late, just before a race, to find the
entrance to the course, which they had to cross in order to
reach the ring, blocked by the police. ‘With his usual utter
disregard of law, Wilfrid whipped up his horses and charged

280 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

straight at the police who fortunately gave way. He tried to
cross, but found that the usual opening on the other side was
too compactly blocked by crowds even for him, and therefore
swished his team round and started galloping up the course.
For a few minutes we were the centre of all attraction, cheers,
hoots and catcalls mingling in a strange symphony. The police
however were, as usual, alive to the necessities of the moment
and a little way farther up they cleared a space where there was
an entrance on the inner side. This Wilfrid’s quick eye
detected and he again swished his team around to the left and
galloped his horses triumphantly to the place reserved for him’.

Akin to the Crabbet Club were the more elusive ‘Souls’, a
number of clever men and pretty women bent on pleasure, ‘but
pleasure of a superior kind’. The ‘vulgarities of racing and
card playing indulged in by the majority of the rich and noble’
bored them. They were unconventional and looked for their
amusements in intellectual diversions and ‘for their excitement
in romance and sentiment’.

Who precisely was a Soul and who not is doubtful. Souls
occasionally reverted to the state of ‘Bodies’, the nickname
given by the elect to the outer circle who had dubbed them
Souls. However fluctuating, the set was in its day a brilliant
cynosure and survives in fin-de-siecle memoirs. Certain members
of the Crabbet Club belonged to it and Blunt himself, if not of
the inmost circle, frequented it. His diaries of the time record
gay parties of the Souls and of dinners given at his rooms in
Mount Street ‘which were for the moment rather the fashion
with the Soul Society’.

4

Blunt’s literary interests were stimulated by the intellectual
bent of the Souls and the Crabbet Club, and especially by
George Wyndham, a critic and poet of delicate sensibility on
his own account. Like Blunt in many ways, Wyndham was

1890-1898 REHABILITATION 281

sufficiently unlike him both in character and point of view to
be an ideally interesting companion. He lacked Blunt’s depth
and the strain of unsatisfied melancholy that was the result
perhaps of moral strength and knowledge of a wider world than
his. Twenty-three years younger, brilliant, handsome, full of
charm and bonhomie , enthusiastic but far more conventional
than Blunt, he held an assured position in the cleverest English
society of the day and in public life. Not least important to
Blunt, he was connected with him by the tie of blood. And
it is hardly necessary to point out that Blunt, with his gifts,
his experience, and his quick sympathetic affection, must have
fascinated Wyndham as few other men could have done.
Wyndham profoundly admired him as a poet — ‘y our poetry
touched me first’, he wrote, ‘when I was very young and
turned me into what I am. But, reading it again, I receive
two vivid impressions : that you are a poet, without any shadow
of doubt, destined to great praise in years still long distant;
and, again, that the stuff of your poetry is linked very closely
with my life’. With Blunt’s political opinions, of course, he
rarely agreed, but the difference became merely an added spice
to their friendship.

The cousins made a two days’ literary pilgrimage to
Stratford-on-Avon. In the evenings they read aloud ‘Venus and
Adonis’ and ‘Lucrece’, two pieces which Blunt had ‘always
admired’, thinking them ‘the most elaborate and sustained of
their kind, and splendidly rhetorical’ — though their kind
pleased him less than Chaucer’s narrative poems in which he
‘always found something wise and witty and unexpected to
carry one along at however slow a pace’ and which had a
brilliance, given by the rhymes, surpassing that of all other
verse. During the day they did the sights, and drove round
the country with a jibbing horse. ‘George’, wrote Blunt, ‘is a
capital companion for a visit of this kind, as he enjoys sight-
seeing, and besides knows all about Shakespeare, and has his
theories about everything’. Blunt, too, if he had not theories
about everything had many about Shakespeare as a man and

282 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

about his plays. His impression of the poet as ‘a strong
practical man, not over-refined, one who at the present day
would have been a successful journalist and man of letters’, he
turned into a sonnet written for the Shakespeare Tercentenary
celebration in 1916. He thought the plays should be read,
not seen. Othello acted by Salvini, in Italian was the only
Shakespearean play that on the stage had ever given him a
real rush of emotion.

When George Wyndham, at the height of his literary
activity, became editor of the New Review in 1896, he asked
Blunt to write for him on Arabian subjects. Blunt responded
with an article on the ‘Moallakat’ or the ‘Poetry of the Ignor-
ance’ including a translation of Antar’s Ode, and an article
on the ‘Origin of the Arabian Horse’, for the June and July
numbers of the journal. The first article, in particular,
interested Wyndham greatly, putting him ‘upon the track of
discovery as to certain features of chivalry in the Middle Ages
in Europe, a subject not yet properly traced to its origin in
Arabia’.

Many of Blunt’s other non-political writings at this time
were concerned with literary criticism, and many with the
Arab horse, part of an extensive study on which he worked
for the rest of his life, although he never finished it. 5

His memoirs were another task which employed him inter-
mittently from now on. In the loneliness that followed on the
Irish adventure and the death of Lytton and Francis Currie
he had begun to read over old diaries, feeling perhaps that a
period in his life, the active period, was definitely over. Look-
ing back he recognized the importance of the entries concern-
ing public events, and became deeply interested in his own
history.

I will sit down awhile in dalliance

With my dead life, and dream that it is young.

He had started the diaries in 1866 when he first read Rous-
seau’s Confessions and determined then and there to write his

REHABILITATION

1890-1898

283

own — ‘and at the same time to have a more satisfactory life to
make record of’. It was no easy matter, a quarter of a century
later, to amplify and clarify where necessary and to add the
history of his early childhood in order to make a readable,
consecutive story. His labours resulted in the many volumes
of memoirs entitled ‘The Alms to Oblivion’ which are locked
now in a black tin box at the Fitzwilliam Museum, by order
of his will not to be opened until thirty years after his death.
From those private folios he culled the published memoirs
that make up his ‘Secret History Series’ upon which he worked
as a running accompaniment to his other activities until his
death.

More important to Blunt as a literary figure is the fact
that the ’nineties were among the years in his life most
prolific of poetry. In 1892 he published his versified and
revised version of Lady Anne’s translation of an Arabian epic
of the tenth century, The Stealing of the Mare . 6 It describes
with Arabian redundancy the customs and superstitions, fights,
and feasts of the Bedouin :

And they brought the fruits and the meats, and dishes meet

for Princes.

And when the meal was done then poured they fair pota-
tions,

Drinking in jewelled cups with skilled musicians and

singers,

(Where should the like be found?) for they sang in such

sweet measure

That, if a bird had heard, it had stooped from its way in

heaven.

In figure and trope they sang, of four-and-twenty stanzas.

In contrast, the simplicity of single lines produces an effect of
plaintive beauty —

And I sat alone with myself in the empty breadth of the

desert —

284 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

He finished in the following year, that ‘idle story with an
idle moral’, Griselda , a society novel in rhymed verse that is
remarkably good reading. Written in the tradition of Byron’s
Don Juan —

Know this, in art that thing alone is evil

Which shuns the one plain word that shames the Devil, —

it has something of the wit and gaiety of its famous predecessor
though rather more pathos.

In this same year Blunt published ‘the finally corrected’
version of Esther , a narrative which he had begun in blank
verse long ago as a young attache in Paris and had later trans-
formed — astutely, since he is most successful with the sonnet
— into a sonnet sequence. With a background of imaginary
scenes and events it tells again the story of his love for Skittles,
but

he who reads shall find
That which he brings to it of heaven or hell.

The poet, an innocent youth with his ‘John the Baptist’s face’,
arrives at Lyons after a summer of wandering in the Alps.
There at the Lyons fair, as he stands gazing at the ‘two
female monsters’, one fat, one thin, in the ‘Booth of Beauty’,
a woman in the crowd clutches his arm.

She was a little woman dressed in black,

Who stood on tiptoe with a childish air,

Her face and figure hidden in a ‘saque’,

All but her eyes and forehead and dark hair,

Her brow was pale, but it was lit with light,

And mirth flashed out of it, it seemed in rays.

A childish face, but wise with woman’s wit,

And something, too, pathetic in its gaze.

He falls in love with her at sight, is shamed by an invitation
to pinch the knee of the fat monster, ‘the ox-eyed queen’, is
laughed at, and flees. Later in the evening he meets his love
again coming from the theatre where she plays the heroine in

REHABILITATION

1890-1898

285

Manon Lescaut and they wander together through the streets,
her charms infatuating him more and more.

Who might describe the humours of that night.

The mirth, the tragedy, the grave surprise
The treasures of fair folly infinite

Learned as a lesson from those childlike eyes?

Entering at last the house of that good soul Madame Blanche,
‘her dressmaker’, the young man succumbs to his love :

Life has given me much

And pleasure much, and Heaven may yet have store
Of nobler hopes to kindle and to touch,

But never for all time, ah, never more,

That delicate dawn of wonder when lips move
First to the love of life and love of love.

They stay three days at Lyons, only three —

This was my term of glory. All who know
Something of life will guess untold the end.

Blunt tells the story with an eloquence which rises from
reflective discourse to high passion and heightens into poetry
the everyday language and homely detail —

crowds agape and in the rain
Watching on tiptoe and with stifled roar
To see a rocket fired or a bull slain,

or ‘laughter from a tavern door’, and

the silence of strange streets,

My own mute footfalls and the redolent gloom
Of oil-lit thresholds.

He mocks his youth wittily, its innocence and shame and
recklessness, but never belittles it. Esther has the truth to life
and to the genius of poetry of the Sonnets of Proteus with the
added interest of the story and the portrait of the young poet.
It is the most important of Blunt’s poems.

286 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

By his publisher’s advice five stanzas were suppressed as
being too outspoken, which were restored twenty-two years
later in Blunt’s collected poems. With Esther were published
in 1892 a group of ‘Love Lyrics’, many of which had been
included among the Sonnets and Songs by Proteus , and another
sonnet sequence, ‘Natalia’s Resurrection’, which contains
some good passages but is too far-fetched. The book is
dedicated ‘to the hand that has forgotten, the ears that cannot
hear, and the lips that shall speak of love no more for ever’.

Blunt was greatly troubled by the apparent failure of Esther
on first publication to make the impression that it later
achieved : he himself frankly ranked it among the great sonnet
sequences. ‘It is not reviewed for which I care little but’, he
wrote in bewilderment, ‘even my friends are silent about it,
and several of them disapprove. Only from George Meredith
has a letter of high approval come, and one from York Powell
at Oxford.’ Powell had long been a sympathetic friend in
literary matters; Meredith’s praise, being less expected, gave
him great satisfaction.

As a poet Meredith stood well below Swinburne in Blunt’s
opinion. Swinburne to him was the first of lyric poets in his
generation, perhaps the greatest England had produced ‘in
any age, the old ballad writers alone excepted, and these
stand by themselves immeasurably above all’. But from him
Blunt never received any commendation; indeed, Swinburne
refused to have anything to do with him on the ground that
he was ‘a Jesuit in disguise working in clerical interests’.
Meredith and Blunt, on the other hand, were sympathetic in
many matters. ‘Blunt,’ said Meredith, ‘is one of the few honest
men we have in public life.’ Though as their literary reader
Meredith had caused Messrs. Chapman & Hall in 1867 to
turn down Blunt’s first little volume of mixed prose and verse
Blunt bore him no grudge — ‘it was a fortunate refusal’. And
Meredith had done in verse one great work, Modern Love. It
was the only poem, Blunt said, which Meredith had drawn
direct from personal experience, and he profoundly admired it.

REHABILITATION

i 890-1 898

287

In 1891 Morris had published at the Kelmscott Press a
now much prized edition of The Love Songs and Lyrics oj Proteus
and Love Sonnets , the only Kelmscott book in which the initials
are printed in red. It comprises the poems which had appeared
in r 8 8 1 along with the best of the love poems written by Blunt
during the intervening decade. 7 The proofs of this edition,
like the proofs of many of Blunt’s books, were corrected by
Lady Gregory. Four years later W. E. Henley, ‘the hospital
poet (a bitter talker, but a sayer of good things)’, with Wynd-
ham’s enthusiastic support, proposed the publication of a
selection of all Blunt’s poems, including Esther in cut form.
He wanted to run Blunt ‘into a more public place as poet’ than
he then occupied. The selection, in which the only previously
unpublished matter was the first part of the ‘Quatrains of
Youth’, came out in 1898 with an illuminating critical preface
by Henley.

Apart from these volumes a multitude of occasional verses,
birthday odes, valentines, and sonnets in every mood, flowed
from Blunt’s pen during these years. No request found him
unresponsive — a hymn was produced for Charles Gatty’s
Translations; a sonnet for the copy of the Kelmscott edition
of the Sonnets of Proteus that Lord Dufferin wished to have for
the ‘Helen’s Tower Library’. He made his first essay in
dramatic form with The Bride of the Nile , a semi-serious extra-
vaganza written in 1 8 9 3 as a relief to his feelings in regard to
Egypt and to make fun of Baring and the British Occupation.
The plot was taken from an incident, told by Abulfeda the
Arabian historian, supposed to have happened at the time of
the Arab invasion by Amru, when relations between Egypt and
the Roman Empire resembled those of 1893 between Egypt
and the British Empire. At amateur performances first at
Crabbet, later at Newbuildings, the play was acclaimed a
success. Four years afterwards he wrote the ‘Mid-Victorian
Drama’ The Little Left Hand, never played but published
among his collected poems.

CHAPTER XXV

EGYPT AGAIN AND LAST EASTERN
ADVENTURES

i

Blunt’s choice for his first dramatic attempt of a subject
which lent itself to satire on the British Occupation of Egypt,
shows that his interest in the East and in the politics of Egypt
was still much alive. This is well borne out by the history of
his winters at Sheykh Obeyd.

Six years after the restoration of Sheykh Obeyd the ‘alarming
intelligence’ reached him that there was on foot a scheme —
‘Projets d’Assainissements’ — for the drainage of Cairo into
the desert near Sheykh Obeyd. It had already reached the
advanced stage of coloured surveys. Blunt wrote at once to
Lord Cromer ‘representing the economical folly of the project
which had chosen the only district in the neighbourhood of
Cairo suitable for building a rural suburb, seeing that it was
the only one which possessed an abundance of good water in
a sandy soil’. Fortunately his argument was hearkened to.
No more was heard of the scheme and, not long after, the
populous suburb of Heliopolis began to grow up in the very
desert that was to have been defiled. Meantime the garden
continued its remote and paradisiacal existence: ‘a blooming
look of extravagant growth . . . cows prosperous, mares in foal,
every servant happy’. Each autumn the quality of its love-
liness, the vivid colours, the depths of shade, the brilliancy of
the light, gave him a fresh shock of pleasure. Life there, so
astonishingly leisurely in outward aspect, had its tang for Blunt
since he had entered again for a short spurt into the political
arena.

288

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 289

With Baring, who in 1892 became Baron Cromer and later
first Earl of Cromer, he remained on the good terms of 1889
for more than ten years' even though he began almost at once
to work against the Resident politically. During the early
’nineties, the period, Blunt thought, of Baring’s ‘first and best
practical energies’ when he had the reformation of abuses
much at heart, Blunt did not suspect him of ‘working, as he
did so flagrantly later, less for the good of Egypt, than in
English political and financial interests’. He had a forlorn
hope that Cromer might do some good in Egypt. Tewfik’s
death early in 1892 and the succession of his son as the new
Khedive, Abbas II, provided Cromer with a fresh opportunity
for a policy of reform. There was a possibility of establishing
a constitutional government since Abbas was strongly native
in sympathy.

As long as Tewfik had lived, it had been impossible for
Blunt to make his peace formally with the Egyptian Govern-
ment. But now his friends urged him to ask Cromer to
present him to the new Khedive as he did other distinguished
English visitors. It was more than eleven years since Blunt
had paid a similar formal visit to Tewfik with Malet. ‘When
we were shown in to-day,’ Blunt wrote in his diary of the
second audience, ‘we were met at the door of the room by a
little young man in military undress whom I took to be an
aide-de-camp, but who turned out to be Abbas himself, a quite
unmilitary figure of proportions which made him look like a
woman dressed up in man’s clothes. He has, however, a very
good manner in talking, and a pleasant smile, with brown
eyes, and just a tinge of russet in his hair. He reminded me
much of his grandfather, Ismail, and has just the same sort of
French accent, talking French well but not perfectly. He
showed no sign of shyness, and treated Baring with easy
politeness, without any sign of special deference; me he treated
with considerable amiability.’ Although the talk turned on
nothing of particular interest Abbas seemed to Blunt to show
‘considerable intelligence’. ‘I shall be surprised,’ he added,

290 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

‘if he does not give Baring trouble.’ Much, Blunt thought,
might be done with him if he were cleverly managed, but he
would not bear driving with any but a very light rein.

Baring, however, read the Khedive otherwise. Long after-
wards Blunt remembered that his manner to Abbas during the
interview had been ‘very abrupt, like that of a schoolmaster
to schoolboy’. Baring missed, Blunt believed, a chance of
making a fresh start with the new Khedive towards a National
Government on constitutional lines and by his subsequent
management so warped the Khedive’s political powers that he
became merely the ineffectual rebellious creature of officialdom.
But not until the summer of 1 902 was Blunt sure of this when
the Khedive in England announced his desire to visit Blunt at
Crabbet and then at the last moment, after all preparations
had been made, under official pressure failed to appear. The
rebuff not only hurt Blunt’s pride sorely, but also shook his
confidence in the strength of Abbas’s convictions. After that
he ceased to have the audiences with the Khedive which had
punctuated his previous winters in Egypt.

Ten months after their first interview, however, his faith
was still fresh. Learning that Abbas was ‘hand in glove’ with
the members of the Party of Liberty, as the constitutional
party was now called, he sent messages to the effect that if
Abbas really wanted Parliamentary government he should
make a stand for it. This advice, he felt, strengthened the
Khedive’s determination some months later to engineer the
coup d'etat of 1893, a complete change of ministry arranged
without the cognizance of Cromer. As a particular step this
coup d'etat was not one that Blunt would have advised, for its
result was a ‘victory’ for Cromer that might have been pre-
dicted. All that Blunt had urged was that the Khedive should
make known his desires frequently and openly.

The Egyptian Prime Minister at this time was an old enemy,
Riaz Pasha. Having done his best to bring the English into
Egypt he now detested their presence there, came over to
Blunt’s point of view and chose him as confidant and adviser.

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 291

The irony of the situation was not lost upon Blunt and he made
use of the new friendship by suggesting to Riaz that he should
convoke the General Assembly and act through it. He also
counselled the Sultan’s representative in Egypt to encourage
Riaz, and agreed to go himself to Constantinople to try to gain
the Sultan’s support. Meantime, to make the situation clear,
he wrote any number of letters to political personages in
England, discussed matters frankly with English officials and
visitors at Cairo, and most important, wrote an article for the
April Nineteenth Century that did some good in presenting the
anti-protectorate case to those who believed in Cromer’s point
of view as the only possible one.

The journey to Constantinople, undertaken at the end of
April, 1893, turned out to be about as unfruitful in political
achievement as his former one in 1884. He might have
obtained, of course, an orthodox audience with the Sultan by
getting the British Ambassador, who received him very
cordially, to present him. But such an audience would have
resulted merely in the usual ‘polite interchange of compli-
ments’. To accomplish his purpose he needed a longer and less
formal interview. He had a letter of introduction from the
Sultan’s representative at Cairo to ‘the Sultan’s chief inter-
mediary between Yildiz Palace and visitors of distinction’ —
but unfortunately, it described Blunt as ‘a rich Englishman
who had for many years defended the cause of the Arabs against
the English Government’. Having learned long since never
to give nor to receive presents in his dealings with Orientals,
Blunt disappointed the expectations aroused by the word ‘rich’
and soon realized that little would be effected through ‘the
Sultan’s chief intermediary’. Good luck, nevertheless, seemed
to be with him for he found both the Seyyid Jemal-ed-Din and
Sabunji in Constantinople and high in the Sultan’s favour.

Sabunji was most friendly and ‘in fine feather, established
at Yildiz as the Sultan’s translator and a court spy’. Jemal-
ed-Din seemed quite willing to consign to oblivion the episode
of the umbrella in the back room at James Street. ‘The old

292 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

Afghan,’ Blunt wrote, ‘received us (Blunt and his daughter)
with open arms and embraced me on both cheeks in a room
filled with reverend Turks and made Judith sit in the arm-chair
of state, and gave us tea and coffee and entertained us for an
hour and a half. Anne had written him a note of excuse in
Arabic, which was read out two or three times with great
admiration at its style and correctness. Then we had a long
talk on politics, partly in Arabic, partly in French, which
Jemal-ed-Din talks pretty fluently .... Altogether a satisfac-
tory visit. There seems a good chance now of my getting my
audience at Yildiz.’

Meanwhile he renewed old friendships — notably with Count
Nelidoff, the Russian Ambassador who had been his intimate
friend when they were attaches together at Athens. He saw
again the old Sultan of Johore and his suite, visitors of the
past winter at Sheykh Obeyd. They were ‘in the seventh
heaven of delight’ over the reception accorded them by the
Sultan of Turkey largely owing to Blunt’s efforts on Johore’s
behalf at Cairo. With General Walter Blunt Pasha, an A.D.C.
of the Sultan, ‘a fine-looking old man in a very smart uniform’
who had been in the Turkish service since 1878 and who
claimed relationship with him — Blunt ‘hardly knew on what
ground — he went to the bazaars and to the Selamlik. And,
following his usual line, he visited the Sultan’s mares at the
Sweet Waters and his stallions at Tildiz — ‘altogether the
grandest Arab collection’ he had seen.

So the week allotted by Blunt to his stay at Constantinople
passed. Though much good will had been expressed, no
audience had transpired. Those who were trying to arrange
for it besought him to put off his departure. But he had given
his time on arrival. He was obdurate: ‘Am I a fakir, I said,
to sit at the Palace door waiting. I am not the Sultan’s
servant, nor will I dance attendance on any king in the world.
If the Sultan wants to see me he must send and say so and I
will come, but to-night I go home.’ And go he did — without
a sense of total failure, since he had arranged to write to Jemal-

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 293

ed-Din letters from England which were to be shown to the
Sultan in order to influence his action towards Egypt.

Much of Blunt’s attention during the following summer in
England was given to the discussion of Egyptian politics.
But with the so-called ‘Frontier Incident’ that took place while
he was in Egypt the next winter, the spurt given the Nationalist
Movement by Abbas’s early endeavours ended. Blunt was
away on a desert journey when the Incident took place. Realiz-
ing that he could do nothing to support the Nationalists, he
kept out of the quarrel and continued to abstain from inter-
ference for some years save for an occasional remonstrance
against flagrant injustice.

In November, 1895, Blunt made his first journey up the
Nile to Wady Haifa. It was characteristic of him not to have
taken before such a purely sight-seeing trip. With a taste that
dates him Victorian he found in Philae alone — the Philae of
pre-dam days — a monument to command his unqualified
praise: ‘Philae ... is perhaps the one perfect thing in the
world, and anything added to or taken from it would probably
spoil it’. The Temple of Medinet Habu, too, he thought ‘a
really fine thing’ and Karnak in the moonlight affected him
deeply. ‘But I am left with the impression,’ he wrote, ‘that
the Nile itself, with its great flow of water and its evergreen
banks and eternal youth is the really interesting thing, far finer
than its monuments’.

At Wady Haifa a deputation of natives of Dongola begged
him to assist them in obtaining permission to return to their
own country. On getting back to Cairo he took up their case
with Lord Cromer who referred the matter to Kitchener, the
Sirdar. Kitchener finally refused the natives all permission to
return on the ground that he did not wish Dongola re-peopled
lest it serve as a base for Dervish raids. ‘Rubbish,’ was Blunt’s
comment. Some months later he was further incensed by hear-
ing that an advance was to be made immediately to Dongola
by arrangement with the German and Austrian Governments,
so as to make a diversion in favour of the Italians, who were

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

294

1 890-1 898

rapidly getting the worst of their war with Abyssinia. Such
obvious sacrifice of Egyptian for European interests, entailing
a re-opening of the Soudan war, seemed unbelievable — ‘and
what has Italy done for Egypt to deserve Egyptian help?’
About all this Blunt wrote the inevitable letters of protest to The
Times, and, following a long interview with the Khedive, sent
an article entitled ‘The Truth of the Dongola Adventure’ to the
Nineteenth Century (May, 1896). For some time after this he
made no more heated sallies against oppression.

The year of the Dongola affair had seen ‘the last’, Blunt
wrote, ‘and perhaps the hardest of all the many desert journeys
that Lady Anne and I undertook alone together, and as such
stands out in my memory as one of the most delightful’. It
was undertaken, like previous yearly expeditions, for the pur-
pose of making maps intended, Blunt said, for private use ‘not
for the Geographical Society (of which I am almost the oldest
member) because I have long since convinced myself that
it makes itself the precursor and instrument of Europe’s
penetrations and conquests against the wild races of man-
kind’.

Armed with such scant and inaccurate maps as the Cairo
Intelligence Department possessed of the country between
Cairo and the Red Sea, the Blunts set out, accompanied only
by their Bedouins and a guide of the Maaze tribe, through an
almost entirely unexplored region of the Eastern desert —
‘through the Maaze country south of the Kalala Mountains
to the granite range of Jebel Shareb southwards to Kufra,
Dokhan, and Kitar, regaining the Nile at Keneh, a journey of
four hundred miles of uninhabited desert, made in twenty days,
of the greatest possible interest’. But the map was not com-
pleted until two years later when Blunt made a six days’ trip
alone with his Bedouins, travelling fast on deltils. It was a
bitter cold journey on the upper plateaux of the Eastern desert
and nearly finished him since his health, none too strong at
best, had been broken down by the trip westward to Siwah
which he had undertaken during the previous year, 1897 —

WILFRID BLUNT IN EGYPT

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 395

the year intervening between the two map-making expeditions
eastward.

2

In 1897 it had seemed to him that the pilgrimage into the
Tripolitan desert of which he had talked with Terence Bourke
at Tunis three years earlier must be made — then or never.
The old desire to seclude himself in a far distant hermitage
had come upon him again with renewed force.

The subtle wonder of the desert came
And touched my longing with its breath of flame
I too, methought, sad child of a new age,

Would learn its mystery and inscribe my name,

Clothed in the garments of its ancient past,

My race forgotten and my creed outcast,

On some lone pile whence centuries look down
On days unchanged the earliest with the last.

Early in February he met at Cairo his friend, Abdullah
Minjowar el Jibali, a member of the confraternity of the
Senussi, who lived in the Fayoum and would help to put him
on his way. A few days later he started with four Bedouins
and Salem, his Egyptian body servant for cook, six camels
of his own, one with foal at foot, and his mare, Yemama.
There was, he knew, a little danger in the expedition, but he
looked forward to it eagerly, regretting only that Lady Anne
was not to accompany him. She and his daughter rode a short
distance with him on the first morning and ‘saw a blue king-
fisher on the way’, Blunt wrote, ‘but I missed seeing it, which
I take for an ill omen’.

The hospitality of Abdullah Minjowah held them up at his
Castle el Jibali for two days uncomfortably among the flies.
Abdullah readily agreed to send two men with camels and a
head man, Beseys, to guide them to El Wah (the small oasis),

296 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

Siwah, Jerabub, where the Zagwiyeh or monastery of the
Senussi was, and Jebel Akhdar. He arranged for Beseys to
carry letters of credence from him introducing Blunt, to insure
favourable reception, as the son of Hajji Batran of Aleppo.
Blunt had known Hajji Batran ’s son at Aleppo and would
greatly have preferred to travel as he almost always had done
under his own name and nationality. Abdullah would consent
only to changing the letter to the Sheykh el Senussi or his
representative, the others he persisted in leaving as they were,
with the fiction of Hajji Batran’s son. In the event the scheme
proved to be ill conceived for it brought misunderstanding
and attack at Siwah.

On the twelfth of February, they really began their journey:
they struck southwards from the Fayoum to the last water
before the oasis of El Wah, water that gushed forth, so the
Arabs said, only when a caravan approached and in volume as
great as the caravan happened to need. Three days of mono-
tonous going across gravelly hamad, and they reached El Wah.
From this point on Blunt travelled under Syrian identity, and
from here Beseys proved to be helpless as a guide: it was
forty-three years since he had been over the road. Blunt was
obliged to hire a tall black Sudani, Osman. Soon it transpired
that he, too, though useful in other ways, was little good as a
guide; he had been over the route only once, twenty-five years
before, by night and going in the opposite direction, escaping
from slavery at Siwah to freedom at El Wah.

The rest of the journey was so full of hardship and danger
that Blunt found it easy to believe that somewhere in this
desert Cambyses and his army had disappeared in ancient times.
His own party were within an ace of a like fate. They were
short of water and had lost the caravan route; but for their
faith in a mirage they might have wandered and died in the
desert. After floundering over ridge after ridge of sand and
galloping across plains of gravel Blunt saw far away what
seemed to be an oasis. As they drew near it disappeared, the
bushes became a pile of black stones ; then, miraculously, they

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 297

found that the pile of stones marked the edge of the great
caravan road which they had not seen for two days. February
27th brought them within sight of the oasis of Zeytoun and,
on high ground, a Senussi monastery. There, at the group of
buildings like a small village, they were made welcome, the
camels and mare watered by servants, and Blunt and his fol-
lowers given dates and milk by a ‘brother’.

Pressing on, they camped that afternoon a half-mile south
of the easternmost of the two towns of Siwah in the sand among
palm groves. That night, a member of the Eastern town,
Mohammed Said, to whom Beseys had brought a letter, called
upon them and was feasted. As he was going, a number of
persons arrived: the governmental representative, and the
Maown, or police officer, and a group of sheykhs from the
western town. Unprepossessing men — the Siwan type at its
best Blunt described as perhaps the ugliest in the world, yellow
skinned, brown haired, snub-nosed, hare-lipped and light-
eyed — they drank coffee and asked many questions, made
curious by old Beseys’ talk and boasts ; but they showed no sign
of hostility. During the night a thief stole Blunt’s carpet
shelter on which the guests had sat outside his tent — another
evil omen. The next morning, as Blunt was giving orders
about the provisions to be bought, an armed party of about
two hundred men on horses and camels and on foot suddenly
appeared from the western town. Except for Osman and one
Bedouin, his servants vanished. To attempt defence was
futile. Within half a minute the hurly-burly burst forth.
Blunt was caught by the wrists and pulled out, the tent topp-
ling about him. He was yanked this way and that, his clothes
were torn off, he was given several blows on the head, a severe
one on the neck, and another from some weapon on the cheek.
The hubbub and confusion were tumultuous.

Luckily Blunt made no attempt at self defence, putting him-
self as soon as possible under the protection of one of the
attacking party. He was led off to the town — where the women
were shrilling the triumph from the housetops — expecting to

298 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

be killed, but interested none the less in the fantastic spectacle.
He was taken into a large room with seats, the council chamber
of the sheykhs of the Western town. Marching to the best
place, he sat down and called for water. It was brought. The
sheykhs seemed now to be by way of protecting him. He asked
the reason for the attack. No intelligible answer was forth-
coming. He then said that he was from Cairo and a friend of
Effendina (the Khedive). They said they cared nothing for
Effendina. At that point the Maown entered. He had offered
Blunt his services the night before, so Blunt now whispered
to him that he was an Englishman. The Maown became still
more courteous. Blunt then whispered to a sheykh next him
that he was an Englishman. The word passed round. There
was a great scurry to restore the plunder and to find a scape-
goat for what they now judged to have been a great mistake.

The chastened sheykhs restored to Blunt his belongings bit
by bit and provided him and his servants, who had returned,
with quarters in the government house whence they could
observe from the roof the life of the town, their camels safe
in the courtyard below. Ramadan ended the night after the
attack and Blunt watched the scene of frenzy and fanaticism in
the streets below. Probably, he thought, Ramadan was the
best explanation of the attack. Abdullah’s plan of disguise and
letter to Mohammed Said, and Beseys’ too fluent talk, had
filled with suspicion the hot-headed sheykhs, their nerves over-
wrought by Ramadan fasting.

‘The Senussia in these oasis towns,’ Blunt noted in his diary,
‘is a mere madness and ought to be suppressed. It is all the
same, picturesque and interesting. I have slept the last two
nights on the house-top, and the midnight call to prayer is the
most impressive thing I ever heard.’ ‘If the condition of
Siwah,’ he added, ‘is all the fruit the Senussia has to show,
the tree can be little worth.’ To continue the journey in search
of a pleasant hermitage among the Senussia seemed hopeless,
and on March 3rd, Blunt began the expedition homeward.
One of the two guides upon whose hire he spent almost his

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 299

last money had taken part in the attack and remarked to him :
‘I have been inquiring about you from your servants, and I
find we made a great mistake about you. It will ruin Siwah!’

Travelling by the shortest northern route, suffering much
of the way from want of water, they arrived at Sheykh Obeyd
on St. Patrick’s Day, after fourteen and a half days of difficult
marching over four hundred and thirteen miles. As usual the
guides had been of little use; Blunt himself had steered the
party, ‘taking careful bearings at every height’.

The low stars led me on as with a voice,

Stars of the scorpion’s tail in the deep South.

As he neared Sheykh Obeyd he met Lady Anne on her way
through the palm grove from the station. ‘I could hardly speak
for tears of joy,’ he wrote. ‘I had been away the forty days,
during which she was to expect no news from me, and this
was the forty-first, and during the whole of that time I had
not spoken a word of any language but Arabic, till I had come
even to think in Arabic and I was weak and worn out, and
famished in mind and body.’

Not long after his return he drew up for the Government,
at Sir Eldon Gorst’s suggestion, a memorandum of the circum-
stances of his journey, for he felt that if the Egyptian Govern-
ment nominally ruled the oasis of Siwah they ought to know
of its rebellious state and make it their business to keep order
there. The place was a spot of ferment, dangerous for all
travellers. Had he himself not been reading on the outward
journey Doughty’s Arabia Deserta — ‘certainly the best prose
written in the last centuries’ — and had he not, in accordance
with Doughty’s counsel, taken a passive line at the time of the
attack, he believed he would probably have lost his life. As it
was, he wrote, the expedition had cleared his mind on one
important point: ‘It is as to religion. My experience of the
Senussia at Siwah has convinced me that there is no hope
anywhere to be found in Islam. I had made myself a romance
about these reformers, but I see that it has no substantial basis,

300

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

and I shall never go farther now than I am in the Mohammedan
direction. The less religion in the world perhaps, after all,
the better’.

3

The journey had left him in wretched health. Hardships
that earlier he might have borne easily now took their toll and
the next two years were an unhappy period of illness. Even
Sheykh Obeyd, the winter after the Siwah expedition, seemed
far less delightful than usual, too primitive to be suited to an
invalid; and even though — possibly because — he managed
the map-making journey into the Eastern desert, he left Egypt
in March bidding farewell to Sheykh Mohammed Abdu as
though he were parting for ever from a dearest friend. He
suffered such pain that he seemed to be dying, and longed for
‘the extinction of the grave’. Only infinitesimal doses of
morphia assuaged the pain.

Early in April he arrived in miserable plight at Saighton
Grange for the Easter holiday with George Wyndham and
his wife, Lady Grosvenor. She suggested that he should make
a pilgrimage to the holy well of St. Winifred to try the effect
of its miraculous waters. He received the idea with enthusiasm.
He was superstitious by nature, and took portents, charms,
even miracles more than half seriously. Besides, they appealed
to his dramatic sense.

Fortified with a dose of morphia, after a bad night of pain,
he set off with his hosts by train from Chester to Holywell,
arriving when everyone was away at dinner and he was able
to bathe alone. ‘There was no difficulty,’ Blunt wrote, ‘in that
sweet old place in supposing ourselves back in the fifteenth
century’. But, he continued, ‘I suppose no pilgrim ever
washed there with less Christian faith and at the same time
with so little mocking spirit. I have a belief in holy places and
holy people quite apart from all religious creeds, and I felt

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 301

a great confidence in the saint that she would do me good. . . .
I did the traditional three journeys through the water up to my
armpits, going down into it by steps and up the opposite
side, and then took a complete dip over my head in the outer
tank and knelt on St. Bruno’s stone’.

The ‘miraculous cure’ that he felt he had undergone the
next day when all pain suddenly disappeared was, alas, of
short duration. No sooner had he left Saighton than he began
to suspect that the Saint had made a fool of him. Neither old
nor new doctors in London were able to help him and he
retired to Newbuildings: ‘The world’, he wrote, ‘is only meant
for those who are in sound health, and the maxim of our fore-
fathers was a sound one, that a dying man should keep wholly
out of sight’. A few days later the crisis came. A blood vessel
broke and for a week or more he lay in danger of death, nursed
by Cowie, Lady Anne’s maid, Miss Lawrence, the hospital
nurse who was to attend him for the rest of his life, and by
Sydney Cockerell, now Sir Sydney Cockerell, 1 who had
recently become his secretary. ‘Then I recognized,’ he
wrote, ‘that St. Winifred had only deferred her benefits, and
that, as in the case of most miracles, she had chosen a natural
road of cure. However that might be, the cure, though it
nearly killed me, was an indisputable one. The pain from
which I had been suffering so long had left me desperately
weak, it is true, in body, but clear in mind, and able once
more to take an interest in life, and at the end of three
weeks to resume my diary.’ Although far from well he was
sufficiently gay to write at the end of the year: ‘Intellectually
I still feel growth, and while growth continues one is not yet
old’.

Five months later he was well enough to make his pilgrim-
age of thanksgiving to Holywell in drizzle and fog with Miss
Lawrence to deposit at the shrine his crutches bound up with
a nightgown and a label : ‘Set here in thankful token of a cure
from long sickness after bathing in St. Winifred’s Well.
By her servant W. S. B., October 19, x 8 98 .’ a

302 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

The five months of convalescence had been anything but a
quiet recuperation. He arranged his papers and books,
putting a new bookplate into the latter where, he wrote
with gratification, ‘it looks a natural part of the volumes
as the book-plate was cut by the man Morris employed for
his armorial designs’. Cockerell entertained him with his
‘interesting recollections of Morris’ with whom he had been
in close association until Morris’s death ; and, somewhat later,
helped him to buy at the sale of Morris’s books a ‘Gerarde’s
Herbal, a Berners Froissart, and Malory’s King Arthur in
the Copeland edition of 1557, the last a book to lie always on
one’s table’ —

But less, methinks, for their high deeds that bore
Their crests so proudly than the one lost sound
Of Launcelot’s step at the Queen’s Chamber door.

‘Cockerell’, Blunt said, ‘is a treasure’ — before many months
passed he had become a dear friend, perhaps the most trusted
of all Blunt’s later friends.

Soon he began literary work, writing several sonnets and an
inscription in verse for the table that had been used by Morris
as a dining-table at the Red House and elsewhere and had been
given to Blunt by Mrs. Morris to stand in the Newbuildings
hall. At the time of Tennyson’s death he had written the
plaintive sonnet asking

What voice shall rouse the dull world from its sleep
And lead its requiem as when Grief was young,

And thou in thy rapt youth, Time’s bards among,
Captured our ears, and we looked up and heard
Spring’s sweetest music on thy mourning tongue
And knew thee for Pain’s paradisal bird;

and now, in response to a request from Mrs. Wyndham he
wrote the acrostical sonnet about Morris and Burne-Jones,
who had died in mid-June, beginning

1890-1898 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 303

Mad are we all, maids, men, young fools alike and old,

... We were not as these were,

Intent, untiring souls who proved time till their death.

The point of view of the poem is characteristic :

— What is life’s wealth? To do. Its loss? To dream
and wait.

But he was hardly just in counting himself, as he does in this
sonnet, among the ‘dazed sheep’, the ‘sluggards’ of the world.
Even set against the standard of Morris and Burne-Jones, he
was no sluggard.

Early in September came word of the defeat of the Khalifa
at Omdurman where countless dervishes were slaughtered.
The Jingo rejoicing over the ‘wholesale massacre’ moved
Blunt’s bile. He protested in a letter to The Times. Except
for an objection on the part of General Gordon’s sister to
vengeance being taken for her brother’s death, no other voice
was raised in disapproval.

A month after the Omdurman outrage, the Fashoda
incident — ‘nothing in it more respectable than the wrangle
of two highwaymen over a captured purse, morally both sides
on a level’ — moved him again to write an article, this time for
the Nineteenth Century. But the Nineteenth Century , in the
person of Knowles, replied that it would be unwise to publish
the article. Some months later Blunt returned to the charge
against the Soudan campaign, more particularly against the
proposed Parliamentary grant to Kitchener. He wrote letters,
he urged questions in Parliament, he thundered about the
desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb — a ‘foul deed’, as, to his
delight, he learned it had been termed by young Winston
Churchill in a book on the Soudan Campaign. For the desecra-
tion he held Kitchener responsible, not Gordon’s nephew
who was popularly supposed to be its perpetrator. He
defended young Colonel Gordon stoutly, thereby earning the
warm gratitude of the Colonel’s family. Kitchener he never
forgave — although had he known him personally he would,

3 o4 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1890-1898

he thought, probably have liked him. ‘He was a frondeur ,’
Blunt wrote, ‘and had a wholesome contempt of officialdom
and the commonplace hypocrisies of the British Empire. He
really, I think, preferred the East to the West, the Islamic to
the Christian idea, but he was brutal in his methods and used
what he had of sympathy with Islam to betray it to Europe.’
So Blunt continued to attack him, despite Kitchener’s occasional
friendly advances made through Lady Carlisle.

In the difficulties now arising in the Transvaal, his sym-
pathies were with neither Boers nor British. Their quarrel
presented itself to him chiefly as a possible alleviation of ‘the
condition of the only people there whose interests I really care
for in the quarrel, namely the blacks. It will also be a beautiful
exposure of our English sham philanthrophy, if at the very
moment the Peace Congress is sitting at the Hague, we flout
its mediation and launch into an aggressive war. Anything is
better than the general hand-shaking of the great white
thieves and their amicable division of spoils.’ As between the
two ‘great white thieves’, however, his sympathies were with
the Boers. ‘The Boer population . . . described as menacing
the British Empire, with its two hundred million souls, is
exactly that of Brighton,’ Blunt wrote; and at the first oppor-
tunity after the declaration of war, sending £50, he joined the
‘Stop the War Committee’. It was a rash step, taken with some
qualms of conscience, for he hesitated to do anything to stop
a war which might ‘smash up the British Empire’. But he
took the risk and, as he was in England during the winter
of 1899, was able to be of considerable aid in backing the
opponents of the Government’s policy in both the Transvaal
and the Soudan.

4

Owing chiefly to his illness Blunt did not accompany Lady
Anne and his daughter to Egypt in the autumn of 1898, but

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 305

spent most of the winter at ‘Gorsey End’ in the New Forest,
near Lyndhurst, which he had rented in September in order
to get easy hunting and to live much out of doors. His
principal friend in the neighbourhood was Sir William Har-
court, whom he saw frequently at Malwood and with whom
he had many spirited discussions. In February he went up
to London to join Lady Lytton at the family dinner-party in
honour of the marriage of his daughter with Lord Lytton’s
younger son, Neville. The marriage itself took place in Cairo
and it fell to the lot of Lord Cromer as Resident to give the
bride away. His reply to the Queen’s telegram of inquiry
about the wedding was bald — ‘marriage duly performed’.
The Queen, Lady Lytton explained, ‘would have liked some-
thing gushing but of course Lord Cromer treated it entirely in
an official way and would go to no expense’. The marriage ‘has
been an event of supreme satisfaction’, Blunt noted in his
diary.

In the course of the winter it was arranged, through Mrs.
Wyndham, an old friend of the painter, for Watts to do a
portrait of Blunt. The plan turned out more successfully
than that made for Blunt in his youth by Mrs. Cameron — the
portrait was a fine one, though Watts, Blunt thought, exag-
gerated in calling it the best that he had ever painted, and
during the sittings the painter expounded with apt illustrations
ideas most sympathetic to the sitter. The two parted on terms
of real affection.

In the spring Blunt purchased Fernycroft, thirty-one acres
of woodland in the New Forest, part of the hereditary lands of
Beaulieu Abbey, an outlying croft where the monks kept
their cows. Writing of a day of partridge shooting there with
Mark Napier and Terence Bourke in September, he recorded:
‘I shot well, the first time since my illness, killing twelve birds
in as many shots, but I am no longer keen for sport of any
kind, and go out principally as an old custom and to justify
the expense of game preserving.’

His logic about shooting was that wild birds and beasts
u

3 o6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

who do no harm to man have a. right to be left in absolute
peace. Those who are helped to breed by being protected
may fairly pay a certain tribute, just as tame beasts do, though
the higher law would be to let all live. Blunt himself gave up
pursuit of the higher law after a week of vegetarianism when
at a party following a long cross-country drive he was reduced
to dining off two mushrooms and a nut. The subject of the
protection of animals, however, continued to exercise him and
resulted in the pleasing paradox of shooting in England to
preserve the game laws but rigorously opposing all shooting
in Egypt where there were none to preserve.

For ‘the brutal attitude of modern man towards animals’,
tolerated by no other great religion, he held Christianity
responsible. It forms part of the brief against the Christian
races of Satan Absolved , the poem upon which he was working
at this time.

The idea of writing Satan Absolved he owed to Herbert
Spencer. Blunt’s letter on Omdurman in The Times and an
article on The Wind and the Whirlwind moved Spencer to
write towards the end of 1898, begging him to undertake a
poem in the form of ‘a dialogue in Heaven after the manner of
Goethe’s Faust between God and Satan, Satan complaining
that mankind has surpassed him in wickedness, sacrificing to
Thor and Odin while nominally sacrificing to Jehovah’.
Blunt doubted his own powers and also the possibility ‘of
getting the subject listened to at the present moment’, but he
set to work. He translated Spencer’s convention of sacrificing
to ancient deities into precise modern terms. Man, he con-
tended, has never lost his simian characteristics, his love of
treachery and evil. These have developed most fully under
cover of the Christian virtues and the Christian belief in the
immortality of the soul; and the Anglo-Saxon race, the
strongest of those who profess Christianity, is the most
impious of all. ‘The hypocrisy and all-acquiring greed of
modern England is an atrocious spectacle — one which, if
there be any justice in Heaven, must bring a curse from God,

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 307

as it has surely already made the angels weep.’ In this sentence
lies the kernel of the poem.

The irony of the indictment is biting and the close reasoning
concerning the gradual perversion of Christian teaching,
interesting. The verses — six foot Alexandrine couplets — move
easily and are often rhetorically good. Sometimes they achieve
fine poetry.

The stars leaped and fled,

As hounds, in their young strength.

But Heaven’s antechamber is oddly like a Victorian parlour —

How sweet in truth Heaven is, its floor of sandal wood,

Its old-world furniture, its linen long in press,

Its incense, mummeries, flowers, its scent of holiness !

God himself is a fussy old potentate, well-meaning but ignorant
and rather vain, bewildered by the charges made against his
rule. And the angels are servile, silly beings. Even Satan,
the proud and scathing hero, remains, when all is said, a man.
This nineteenth century realism gives polemic edge and was
deliberate — Blunt called the poem ‘A Victorian Mystery’ —
but it is one of the reasons why Satan Absolved falls short of
its author’s best work.

Just before finishing it in May 1899, Blunt travelled down
to Brighton to see Spencer. He found the old philosopher in
carpet slippers, valetudinarian and dessicated, and was unable
to feel himself ‘in the presence of a great man’. This disappoint-
ment did not prevent him from appreciating Spencer’s clear
and logical mind or his achievement or from acknowledging a
debt of gratitude to him. But it added to his enjoyment of
Spencer’s discomfort at having Satan Absolved dedicated to
him. Spencer was ‘in a terrible fright lest it should be found
out that he gave the idea “on account”, he said, “of the
odium theologicum and the injury it might do the spread of his
philosophy”.’ It was no comfort to him to share the odium
with Watts whose ‘Angel of Pity weeping over the dead birds’
wings’ formed the frontispiece.

308 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

When, early in October, the advance copy of the poem
arrived from its publisher, John Lane, Mafeking had been
invested, the Boers were advancing steadily southward,
Swinburne had just brought out ‘a ridiculous sonnet in favour
of the war’, and Kipling had been publishing imperialistic
pieces in The Times. ‘My Satan Ah solved ’, Blunt wrote, ‘must
stand for poetry on the other side.’ He received a number of
commendatory letters and from Sir Wilfrid Lawson some
verses protesting amusingly against the total darkness of
Blunt’s view, ending :

Some good yet we may see when there comes to the front

The excellent doctrine of Lawson and Blunt.

But, ‘as was to be expected’, the poem was ‘fearfully maltreated
in the newspapers’. A severe article appeared in the Chronicle
quoting Newman, and complaining of Blunt’s profanity. As
the Boer War went more and more against the British Army,
the Press notices of Satan Absolved became more and more
vindictive. They began by admitting that the poetry had some
eloquence; then it was found clever, but vulgar; then blas-
phemous, vulgar and stupid. Finally the condemnation was
extended to all Blunt’s poems. It was even discovered —
erroneously, needless to say — that the sonnets of Proteus were
a plagiarism of Meredith’s Modern Love. However, it was not,
as Blunt observed, the first time that he had had the world on
his back. He himself felt the poem to be ‘really the most
important of all I have written though not likely ever to be
much read’. He was more content with life, in consequence,
feeling he had done all he could, and made his ‘individual
protest against the abominations of the Victorian Age’.

Through Kegan Paul, his publisher, Blunt learned that
Father Tyrrell, the Modernist, at that time still a member of
the Society of Jesus, agreed that Satan Absolved was ‘a real
discovery in that branch of philosophy’ concerning man’s
position in the universe, and had said, among other approving
things, that Blunt’? account of the Incarnation ‘was precisely

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 309

the one he had always had in his mind’. Upon acquaintance
Father Tyrrell proved to be highly sympathetic — ‘as en-
lightened a priest as I have ever met’, said Blunt. A few
months before, Mivart’s startling article on ‘the Continuity
of Catholicism’ had led Blunt to feel that a Catholic writer
equally bold might, forty years earlier, have saved him much
infidelity; and in Father Tyrrell, also, he found a priest whose
outspoken courage might have saved his faith had he met it
years before. A warm friendship sprang up between them,
based on a mutual regard for each other’s courage in ‘heresy’,
and lasting until Father Tyrrell’s death in 1909. When
Father Tyrrell’s posthumous volume of verse, Versions and
Perversions, was published, Blunt was touched to find that it
had been dedicated to him.

Another new friendship made in the year of the publication
of Satan Absolved which continued to the end of Blunt’s life
was with Lady Margaret Sackville who visited him at Ferny-
croft. It was in great measure owing to his influence that she
began at this time to write verse, and to his encouragement
that she published years later her ‘really admirable’ volume of
anti-war poems and, in 1919, the Selected Poems for which
Blunt contributed a preface. He wrote many poems to her, some
of them now published among his ‘Later Sonnets’, such as:

What price, child, shall I pay for your bright eyes
(How large a debt !) the light they shed on me? . . .

— Nay, I can pay naught ....

Yet be my wealth yours, joys that fools deny,

Knowledge of life, love, power as presbyter,

The wit to teach youth’s zeal to use its wings.

On the whole he was happy at Fernycroft. But towards the
end of November he entered in his diary: ‘Fernycroft stripped
of its leaves looks melancholy enough and the thought of
Egypt with its birds and butterflies is irresistible’. Within a
few days he was off, looking forward with delight to the
return to Sheykh Obeyd, otherwise feeling depressed enough:

3 io WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

‘The only thing I love now is my cat, and I am obliged, alas,
to leave it behind.’

5

The return to Sheykh Obeyd was like ‘rising again from
the dead. Everybody connected with the place’, wrote Blunt
ruefully, ‘clearly took it for granted I should be seen in it
no more, and acted on the supposition. Nothing very bad has
been done, and some changes are for the better, but still they
have been made. My gazelles have been sent to the Zoological
Garden, some of the horses have been sold, the house has
been rearranged. I feel like a guest in it — the revenant — the
ghost who has returned. Perhaps it is all the more delightful,
for the garden is in splendid leaf, the trees never had a thicker
shade in a more brilliant sunshine.’

He was risen from the dead stronger in health than he had
been since the Si wah journey. The year in England had done
him good. And when in February Sydney Cockerell arrived
in Egypt, he determined to turn his long-cherished dream of
a pilgrimage to Mount Sinai into a reality. The party, made
up of Blunt himself, Cockerell, Blunt’s nurse Miss Lawrence,
and two Arabs, Suleyman and Hassan, took passage on
March 8 th at Suez by the Khedivial steamer, the Chibine , for
Tor, along with three or four hundred Moslem pilgrims
bound for Mecca and Medina.

About three in the morning of the first night, while Blunt
lay in his berth thinking over the lapse of years since he was
last at Mount Sinai and ‘the poor issue of our short lives’, he
felt the vessel shiver under a blow, and immediately after came
a second blow. The ship had struck a coral reef. On deck
they found the wind blowing strong and the pilgrims reciting
prayers but no one was frightened and there, seemed to be no
immediate danger. Nothing could be done till daylight, so
Blunt went below to sleep again.

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 311

In the morning they could make out that they were north
of Ras Jehan, and later learned that no watch had been kept
the previous evening and the vessel, far out of its course, had
driven straight on a reef without slackening speed. One of
the four boats with which the ship was wretchedly supplied
had already been lost and a seaman drowned in putting off
in it. The wind was rising steadily and the steamer began to
heel over alarmingly. Blunt finished reading Tolstoy’s
Resurrection-. ‘It is a most depressing book, and makes one as
willing as one can easily be to leave a life so miserable as
Tolstoy shows it. . . . All the same one clings a bit to life,’
Blunt jotted in his diary, ‘there is a certain physical menace
in death which it is ill to face, and I feel it more strongly this
afternoon than I did last night when the danger was vaguer
and newer. ... It is the physical repulsion that one has, that
of being knocked to pieces on the reef, or drowned in one’s
cabin. . . . My only satisfaction is to think Anne did not
come with us.’

By the next morning the situation had become ‘almost
hopeless’. Waves swept the upper deck, the wind had
increased in violence and, if it held, the ship would break up.
The pilgrims prayed, and Blunt read the Gospels, and, as
water began leaking into the cabin, said his ‘usual prayers to
the dead and to St. Winifred, who may help me as she did
three years ago, a superstition which quiets the mind’. Other-
wise things went on as before and soon the pilgrims’ prayers
grew quieter and Blunt settled down to a novel.

At first the pilgrims had not been friendly but after Blunt
had sided with them against the Captain by insisting that a
boat be put off to carry news of the wreck to Tor, their attitude
changed. With one or two, Blunt and his companions made
fast friends. Drinking-water was short and they doled out
oranges with which they had come aboard supplied, thereby
further ingratiating themselves. At sunset a great ship was
sighted, but too far away to see the distress signals.

‘We under our awning on the bridge,’ Blunt wrote on the

312 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

fifth day, ‘have passed a not quite uncomfortable night’ — the
fourth night. ‘Only one woke every few minutes with a start,
and thoughts forced themselves on one’s mind of things
beyond the world. There were signs of lightning in the hills
in the direction of Mount Sinai, and one seemed to see in
them God’s anger in his dwelling place, perhaps at one’s
impiety at seeking to set foot on it, and for the attitude I have
taken of having complained of his dereliction of his duty and
neglect of the World and Man. Towards morning just in
front of us stood the Scorpion, for the sky was clear, and it
reminded me of many things. . . . 12th March — our fourth
day on the reef, which is whiter than ever with foam — the
wind stronger and the waves higher. The cabins aft are
flooded, and the people are leaving them, and crowding on to
the bridge. . . . The pilgrims are in straits for water, and I
hear that a woman and child have died. The stewards, mean-
while (for the government of the vessel and the administration
of the supplies are abominable) are selling soda water at
exorbitant prices to the richer people. . . . Personally I have
not drunk a tumbler of water in the last three days and have
eaten nothing but half a dozen oranges. The morphia I have
taken does away with both thirst and hunger.’

Then, ‘behold as a coup de theatre , H.M.S. Hebe , a gunboat,
arrived from Suez to the rescue, and, when the sea abated,
took Blunt’s party aboard. Other ships by that time had
arrived to take the pilgrims on to Jeddah. The Hebe returned
to Suez. During the night the Captain, whose cabin he
shared, asked Blunt what o’clock it was. ‘I told him’, wrote
Blunt, ‘a quarter to three. He was surprised at my knowing
this when, having struck a match, he found that I was exactly
right. I had calculated it by the stars in the Scorpion’s tail,
which are an excellent clock at this time of year, but sailors
have forgotten these old-fashioned observations of the stars.’

The perils which he had encountered Blunt realized were
of all too common occurence in the pilgrim traffic in the Red
Sea. He lost no time in laying before Lord Cromer and in

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 313

writing to The Times an account of the Khedivial steamship’s
disaster. A Naval Court of Inquiry was held at Suez; Blunt
was thanked for his ‘public-spirited action’ in calling attention
to the mismanagement of the pilgrim traffic; and eventually
the pilgrims’ hardships were somewhat alleviated.

6

The shipwreck on the Chibine was the last of Blunt’s
Eastern adventures and except for a short visit to Damascus
with Lady Anne, Cockerell, and his nurse Miss Lawrence,
in the spring of 1904 he attempted no more travels in the
East. After farewell visits to the Khedive and his old
neighbour Hassan, who besought him to have a lamb slain
for Sheykh Obeyd in honour of the rescue, he returned to
England, breaking the journey in Italy — at Brindisi, where
he learned the good news of his grandson’s birth; at Florence;
at Lucca, where he had not been since 18 £2 and where he
and Cockerell now paid a visit to Ouida; and at Turin, to the
Duchess of Aosta, the Princesse Helene with whom he had
made friends in Scotland. The close of the year, however,
found him back in Egypt in the retrospective mood induced
by the turn of the century, writing a letter to The Times in a
fine rage: ‘The Shame of the Nineteenth Century’ — a vivid
indictment of the part played by England in exterminating
other races and her consequent deterioration.

Of the new century he could prophesy ‘nothing except that
it will see the decline of the British Empire. Other worse
Empires will rise perhaps in its place. ... It all seems a very
little matter here in Egypt,’ he wrote, ‘with the Pyramids
watching us as they watched Joseph, when, as a young man
four thousand years ago, perhaps in this very garden, he
walked and gazed at the sunsetbehind them, wondering about
the future just as I did this evening.’

Nor were the first years of the new century calculated to

3H WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

encourage him concerning the Empire. The old Queen died;
and the new King was hailed — somewhat mistakenly — as a
‘peacemaker’. But the monarchy of England is a constitutional
one and imperial gain, he knew, had become a firmly-rooted
ideal among the people of all classes.

News reached him in July 1901 of a conflict at Sheykh
Obeyd between some English officers and his Arab servants
and of the arrest of his Arabs. The servants had been ordered
to allow no one inside the walls during Blunt’s absence, partly
for the sake of the brood mares, partly to protect the wild
animals that found sanctuary there. When the young officers
from the Cairo garrison suddenly burst into the enclosure
with their English fox-hounds and hunted the half-tame foxes,
the servants, ‘to whom the arbitrary ways of English fox-
hunters were altogether a novelty’, at once set upon them.
It was a case of assault by the officers and counter-assault,
without serious injury on either side; and in England, said
Blunt, if it had come at all before a bench of magistrates,
which is improbable, would have been settled at most by a
light fine. In Egypt, however, it was at once made an impor-
tant political issue. The servants ‘were accordingly, by a
summary and irregular process arrested and sent for trial under
circumstances so unusual as to amount to intimidation, before
a native court’. They were sentenced to imprisonment only,
but when they were released it was discovered that they had
been subjected illegally to hard blows. The officers were not
allowed to be either counter-prosecuted or subjected to the
formality of an English court-martial. As there had already
been other affairs of similar conflicts between native servants
and officers of the garrison that had had similar results, Blunt’s
case was regarded by Egyptians as a test case of the way in
which English military scandals were hushed up abroad, and
‘of the whole of the relations of native Egypt with the officers
and soldiers of the British Army of Occupation’.

On the basis of the imperfect information that came to
him in England, Blunt at once opened a correspondence with

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 315

Lord Lansdowne, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and wrote
letters to the various London papers which ‘evoked much
public sympathy’. Questions were asked in the House of
Commons, eliciting a promise that papers should be laid before
Parliament, and after the Blunts had reached Cairo, a Blue
Book (Eg. 3, 1901) appeared — one of the most amusing of all
Blue Books, Blunt observed with relish in his diary — revealing
both ‘something of the irregularities which had been prac-
tised’, and ‘the strange discrepancies which existed between
the documents of the trial and the account given by the
Foreign Office’. It called forth another letter from him to
Lord Lansdowne giving the facts which had been ‘gradually
unravelled with the assistance of the highest legal authorities
at Cairo’ from Lady Anne’s translation of the dossier of the
case. Lord Lansdowne, after referring it to Lord Cromer,
refused to lay the letter before Parliament.

The case ended with the ‘explosion’, towards the end of
May, of what Blunt called his ‘bomb against Cromer’: an
exposure of ‘the systematic interference with the law in
Egypt which has come to be an unfortunate feature latterly
of Lord Cromer’s policy’. Somewhat curtailed it appeared in a
prominent place with good comment in most of the London
papers, and made, as Blunt remarked, a big noise.

The first years of the century had brought Blunt back also
to a not unimportant part in Irish affairs. He was especially
useful in smoothing the path of confidential negotiation
between the Irish Members of Parliament, particularly John
Redmond, and George Wyndham, now Chief Secretary to
Ireland. On his return from Egypt in 1903 Blunt learned
from Wyndham that after the first reading of his Irish Land
Bill a representative member of the old Tory phalanx had
been to Arthur Balfour to explain that much of the Bill was
difficult to swallow and that the whole thing could only be
made palatable if the Irish members would agree that it would
end the land quarrel and accept it as a final settlement.
Wyndham asked Blunt to try to make the Irish leaders under-

3 i6 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

stand that the whole cause of Irish land legislation might be
wrecked by indiscretion on this particular head. It was like
Blunt to accept with some satisfaction the irony of a situation
in which George Wyndham, who had repudiated him for his
Irish doings in 1888, turned to him for help in Irish policy.
He chafed only slightly when Wyndham, somewhat naively
reversing the roles, began to sing O’Brien’s praises to him.

For the next months he was busy going back and forth
between the two leaders, Redmond and Wyndham, passing
on memoranda and discussing detailed points of the Bill and
its amendments. On May 3rd, to his great satisfaction, he
arranged a meeting between them in Chapel Street where
he had recently taken a house: at the end of three quarters of
an hour’s discussion they shook hands, and Redmond went
away, leaving Wyndham delighted. It had been, Blunt felt,
a historic meeting. On May 10th the Bill passed its second
reading, but it was to go through many vicissitudes before
successfully weathering the third reading towards the end of
July. The part that he played in the Irish affairs of that year
— repeated, though to a less important extent, two years later —
gave him confidence that his ‘life had not been quite wasted’.

An Irish matter in which Blunt also became the inter-
mediary two years later was of a different sort: at the request
of William Butler Yeats he broached the subject with George
Wyndham of a patent for the Abbey Theatre at Dublin and
obtained his warm support. Lady Gregory and Yeats had
already interested Blunt in their literary movement, urging
him to discover some Celtic blood in his veins and come to
Ireland to help them in the literary revival. He attended
meetings of their society in London and went with enthusiasm
to see their plays performed; and he himself had dramatized
an episode from the Cuchulain Saga. Fand of the Fair Cheeky
‘a Faerie in three acts’, was finished at Fernycroft in 1902
and privately printed in 1904. Like his other two plays it is
written in rhymed Alexandrines whose fluency justifies Blunt’s
preference for them as a dramatic medium. Fand is the best

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 317

of the three. The truly human robustness with which fairies
and heroes disport themselves in an exotic setting harks back
partly to the Celtic source of the piece and partly to the Arabic
literature in which Blunt was steeped and which seemed to
him akin to the Irish sagas.

To Blunt’s great pleasure both Lady Gregory and Yeats,
of whose critical judgment he had the highest opinion, praised
Fand warmly. They told him that the Abbey Theatre intended
putting it on. Three years passed and he had given up all
thought of this when, one April evening in 1907, on opening
the Pall Mall Gazette , he saw, to his astonishment, an announce-
ment in large type of Fand having been performed at the Abbey
Theatre with great success. ‘It is only in Ireland, I suppose,’
he observed, ‘that a play could be performed for the first time
and the author know nothing about it.’

In 1 903 Blunt finished and published his poetic version of
Lady Anne’s skilful translation of The Moallakat or The Seven
Golden Odes of Arabia^ dedicating it ‘to Frederick York Powell
in token of an old friendship and of much oriental sympathy.’ 3
His preface provides the reader with a background for under-
standing the ‘Poets of the Ignorance’, of the days before
Islam lighted the minds of men. They were superb boasters,
naive and passionate — and wise with the wisdom of Zoheyr
in the last verses of his ode. Blunt has succeeded in rendering
something of their ‘stupendous hedonism’ and ‘splendid
realism’ and also of the grandeur and cadence of Arabic verse.

Cloud-wrecked lay the valley piled with the load of it,
high as in sacks the Yemami heapeth his corn-measures.

Seemed it then the song-birds, wine-drunk at sun-rising,
loud through the valley shouted, maddened with
spiceries,

While the wild beast corpses, grouped like great bulbs up-
torn,

cumbered the hollow places, drowned in the night-
• trouble.

3 i8 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

During the early years of the century Blunt wrote a certain
amount of literary criticism — and gathered materials for his
‘horse book’. Assisted by Cockerell, he worked over the
manuscript of his brother-in-law’s Astarte. He approved of its
publication although he found the Byron papers, on which it
is based, ‘a ghastly record’, and tried vainly to persuade Lord
Lovelace to mitigate his charges against Byron’s publisher,
John Murray. A little later he began a piece of writing upon
which, as upon so many others, he worked intermittently
for the rest of his life but never finished. The plan of expound-
ing his own philosophy of life was suggested to him by a
book on Buddhism of Lafcadio Hearn’s in which he became
interested on a visit to the Duke and Duchess of Aosta at
Turin. He called his book The Religion of Happiness —
‘happiness needs to be learned’, he said — and intended it to
be the most important of his writings and the quintessence of
his autobiography.

He completed and privately printed his memoirs of the last
years of the nineteenth century, published much later as the
first volume of My Diaries. And, with Sheykh Mohammed
Abdu’s help, he finished The Secret History of the English
Occupation of Egypt to which he had devoted himself, at Abdu’s
suggestion, after an Arabic newspaper in Egypt published
‘a fantastic account’ of his life and doings. And he enjoyed the
task : ‘There is nothing really so comic as history for those who
live to see both ends of the joke’.

During 1904 he was engaged upon a voluminous corres-
pondence in the Daily Chronicle about the well-water on the
part of his estate lying in East Grinstead, and, more important,
upon arranging for the settlement of Crabbet Park on his
daughter. He ‘ended his reign’, as he put it, ‘after thirty-two
years and a half of it’ in order to evade the death duties because
he felt that he could hardly live long. The Lordship of the
Manors of Worth and Oram, with Worth Forest, Springfield
and Newbuildings, he retained.

. Altogether Blunt did an astonishing amount of work at

1898-1905 LAST EASTERN ADVENTURES 319

this time when he was physically far from fit and the illness
was developing from which he never really recovered. In
December, 1 904, at Sheykh Obeyd, an attack of fever affected
his lungs and kidneys, and left him feeling twenty years older.
It was accompanied by ‘violent depression’ that reached its
climax when he learned that the pretty young Bedouin wife
and three small children of one of his Arabs had died of
smallpox. Their Arab relations were too terrified of the
disease to tend them; had he been well, he thought, he might
have saved them.

Occasionally he was able to sit for an hour with Sheykh
Mohammed Abdu in the Mufti’s garden. Mohammed Abdu
had been given in 1897 an acre of the land of Sheykh Obeyd
on which he built a country house where he lived during the
winter. ‘I know no society’, Blunt wrote in his diary at this
time, ‘so pleasant as his nor so improving. It is all the society
we have here as we see nothing of Europeans’. They were
‘in a kind of Coventry’ with the English officials because of the
fox-hunting case and Blunt’s attacks on Cromer.

By the end of January he was able to make a short desert
journey with his son-in-law Neville Lytton, to take provisions
to his bereaved Arab. But soon he was laid up again with
‘malarious fever’ and felt, he observed, like a hare headed
first by one greyhound and then by another. A week after-
wards he left Sheykh Obeyd as it seemed to him for ever.

The journey to England was ‘a terrible experience of fever
and pain’. The English doctor at Venice warned him that to
attempt to go farther would mean that he would die in the
train, and put him on a diet of no food, only Vichy water with
a teaspoon of brandy in it twice a day. The regime of starva-
tion reduced him to such weakness that he could not move
and began to have visions. Fortunately his old ally, Button
Bourke, was living in Venice. Cockerell sped to him there.
Between them they managed to get him to England by mid-
April where he was pronounced to have Malta fever.

He describes the next hideous weeks in his published

3 20 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1898-1905

diaries: ‘I had hardly got down to Newbuildings when I
began to be seized with a pain in the nape of my neck, which
gradually increased in violence till it became a perpetual
agony, preventing me from taking any rest whatever either
day or night .... I had a bed made up for me in the hall, but
could not actually lie down on it, and remained day and night
propped up, my forehead resting on a band fastened to the
bed-head against which I leaned it, or I would wander from
room to room and from chair to chair on the ground floor,
followed by my nurse.’ As part of the whole nightmare came
the news that Mohammed Abdu had died — ‘a terrible per-
sonal loss to me and a public one quite incalculable for the
world of Islam’.

Once more Blunt’s life was despaired of. Nevertheless he
did not die, ‘though emerging as one who had passed through
the Valley of the Shadow of Death’. The fever, it was found,
had affected his spine and he was to remain on his back in
bed for at least three months.

The devotion of his friends during these months was a
happiness to him. When he was able to go to London they
visited him constantly at his house in Chapel Street and he
called on them in a wheeled chair. At the end of the year he
noted in his journal: ‘During the last six weeks in London
I have seen more friends, and more of them than in the
preceding six years. I have ceased to worry myself about
public affairs. I shall never, now the Mufti is dead, go
again to Egypt, nor even, I think, cross the Channel. If I
recover I mean to live out my few remaining years as much
as possible with my friends here in England, and enjoy
the little things of life at home. My friends . . . now, I perceive,
look on me as wise. It is all old age can reasonably aspire to
in the way of happiness.’

CHAPTER XV

THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES
AND COLLECTED POEMS

i

The year 1 905, as Blunt had foreseen, was the last in which
he spent so much as a day away from England. Illness and
increasing age robbed travel of most of its pleasure. Three
years lafer he fell desperately ill again. His throat was declared
tubercular and again he was threatened with death if he would
not undergo an operation. With an aversion to surgery, owing
in part to fatalism, in part to fastidious taste, he preferred to
risk death. The crisis passed, though the disease continued
its hold and obliged him to live henceforth the regimented
life of an invalid.

Lady Gregory said that Blunt needed politics and hunting
for excitement, but after these successive illnesses, though he
still drove his Arabs, and occasionally rode them, his sport
often was restricted to shooting from his wheeled chair, and
his political activity to the written word and discussions with
his visitors. Fortunately he had many diversions unconnected
with either sport or politics. He read enormously, chiefly at
night, never failing to set down his opinions when he took up
his diary in the very early morning. He had always been
interested in painting and was something of a theatre-goer.
In all the arts his taste was catholic; his judgment, naturally,
was limited by the conventions in matters of form and ‘truth
to life’ of his own generation. Tolstoy’s two great novels
seemed to him ‘probably the greatest novels ever written’
because, like the Decameron (to Blunt the first of all prose
works of fiction) they showed ‘human nature precisely as it is
x 321

322 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1905-1912

to-day and was yesterday and ever will be’. Meredith’s novels,
on the other hand, bored him because the characters, especially
the women, conveyed no sense of reality. Although he heartily
damned George Moore’s Vale as exemplifying ‘bad art’ at its
worst, he was honest enough to admit admiration for Moore’s
Memoirs of My Dead Life : ‘it is a book crapulous to the last
degree, but interesting because of its fidelity to the facts of the
period described and for its high literary quality. I saw enough
of the Bohemian world at Paris in my youth to recognize the
truth of Moore’s presentment of it and no English writer has
ever evolved a better narrative style. The characters are alive
and real and nothing is shirked in the telling.’

Rarely, however, did the exponents of the new tendencies
in art so far escape excoriation. Where there was apparently
an entire break with tradition Blunt could find nothing good.
The great French post-impressionist exhibition of 1910 in
London was either ‘an extremely bad joke or a swindle’. He
was inclined to think the latter, for there was no trace of
humour in it. The Futurist exhibition of the following year
he dismissed as ‘mere nonsense, the sort of things a child
might make by pasting strips of coloured paper together as
patchwork’. For contemporary painting he needed a new
orientation for which he had neither inclination nor youthful
adaptability.

By the theatre he was less put to it. It demanded little mental
readjustment. Experiments at the Theatre Antoine in Paris
interested him. Gilbert Murray’s translation of the Hippolytus
of Euripides, with its echoes of Swinburne and Tennyson,
swept him off his feet: ‘At the end of it we were all moved to
tears, and I got up and did what I never did before in a
theatre, shouted for the author, whether for Euripides or
Gilbert Murray I hardly knew’. Bernard Shaw’s comedies
delighted him.

Blunt met Shaw first when Neville Lytton was painting his
portrait — in papal robes since Shaw’s features resembled those
of Velasquez’s Pope Innocent X 1 — and at once appreciated

1905-1912 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 323

him at full value. He was by no means convinced that Shaw
always knew what he was talking about, and he regarded
Shaw’s Fabianism as ‘socialism without the few humanitarian
virtues which commonly go with it, without romance and
without honesty of principle, only opportunism’. None the less,
he had an admiration for Shaw equalling, he observed, Shaw’s
own. Wit, at least in the English tongue, began with Shaw.
Shaw, moreover, fought brilliantly and without fear for many
of the causes which Blunt himself upheld. They shared a
common hatred of injustice and hypocrisy.

This same hatred, diluted and in a different form, created a
certain sympathy also between Blunt and Francis Thompson
whom Wilfrid Meynell had brought for a few hours’ visit to
Newbuildings towards the end of the century. In 1911 he
came again, emaciated and helpless, to spend some weeks in
one of Blunt’s cottages near Newbuildings. Every day
Thompson was driven over to lunch in the Jubilee Garden
and to lie through the afternoon sleeping or pretending to
read, often with his book upside down. Blunt described him
later with sympathy and inimitable art: ‘As he moved among
us, or lay silent in his dreams his face might have been that
of some Spanish saint of the days of Isabel the Catholic,
tortured to inanition by his own austerities ; or again it might,
so small it was, have been that of a prematurely aged and
dying child.’ Sometimes he would talk to Blunt of his life
and his poetry. As the weeks passed he grew feebler, and
during the last fortnight of his stay, in October, ‘gave himself
up entirely to laudanum’. A month later, in London, he died
and, at Wilfrid Meynell ’s request, Blunt wrote a memorial of
him published first in the Academy , and later as a pamphlet,
relating what he had learned from the poet about his life.
It is one of the few examples of highly wrought prose written
by Blunt, and is admirably suited to its subject and occasion.

In 1 9 1 1 Wilfrid Meynell had established himself and his
family at Greatham, within easy distance of Newbuildings.
Henceforth he was often a visitor there; and Blunt

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

324

1905-1912

sometimes drove four-in-hand to Greatham to see him. A
more constant visitor to Newbuildings was Hilaire Belloc who
had moved in 1902 to Shipley, only a couple of miles away.
His paradoxical mind, clever talk and many enthusiasms
entertained Blunt. When he proposed starting a paper, the
Eye Witness , Blunt encouraged him, as he did in regard to most
of his projects, and contributed to the first number the pro-
phetic ‘Coronation Ode, 1911’, calling on Man to denounce,
in the day of her rejoicing, England’s betrayal of her ancient
name of Liberty.

Somewhat later another new acquaintance who became a
valued friend bicycled up to Newbuildings — Lord Osborne
Beauclerk, later Duke of St. Albans, quite the most sympathetic
young man Blunt had met for a long time. ‘He is hardly at all
educated,’ remarked Blunt, ‘but has a large experience of men
and cities, or rather of wild places which are not cities. He has
been at Eton and understands its snobbery; he has been in the
Army and understands its futility ; he is a landlord and under-
stands its duties; he is without pretension and has a kindly
heart.’

Blunt began, too, to see much of Winston Churchill, who
had married Clementine, the daughter of his old friend, Lady
Blanche Hozier. He hoped that he might influence Churchill’s
political views as he had Lord Randolph’s, pressing him even
towards certain domestic as well as foreign reforms; in 1910,
at Winston Churchill’s request, he sent to him at the Home
Office, a memorandum on Prison Reform, founded on his
own experience. 2 He delighted in Churchill’s quick grasp
and turn of political subjects. ‘He has just his father’s talent
of seizing the points of a situation and driving them home in
his replies. He fills me with admiration and delight.’

Apart from friends a remarkable variety of casual visitors
came to Newbuildings: Turks, Poles, Russians, Americans,
to inspect the Arab stud; travellers setting out to Persia and
Persians themselves to seek advice ; Indian leaders and zealous
young Nationalists, ‘a quite black West African from Sierra

1905-1912 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 325

Leone’, and of course, Egyptians, to discuss their ‘Move-
ments’ with Blunt. Besides, there were English visitors by
the score, unconnected with either politics or Arabian horses:
Cecil Sharp, collector of folk songs, with whom Blunt went
‘to see old Jupp at Carpenters’ making him sing his Bristol
song and ‘the Fisherman’, ‘of which last’, Blunt wrote, ‘I took
down words’; Father Richard de Bary, who had been Father
Angelo, a Capuchin Modernist at Crawley, and was now the
Anglican Priest at the Shaftesburys ; A. E. Housman, the
Cambridge Professor of Latin and author of A Shropshire Lad ,
who had a ‘disconcerting way of refusing to smile’ when
anything funny was said, even when he saw the joke — ‘I sup-
pose dons are like that’, remarked Blunt.

Perhaps the high conversational point of these years was the
week-end in 1912 when George Wyndham, the Churchills and
Mark Napier assembled to celebrate with Blunt the completion
of the new Manor House that he had built in Worth Forest —

I love the Forest; ’tis but this one strip
Along the watershed that still dares keep
Its title to such name. Yet once wide grown
A mighty woodland stretched from Down to Down,
The last stronghold and desperate standing-place
Of that indigenous Britannic race
Which fell before the English.

Blunt’s diary for the nineteenth of October reads: ‘This has
been a great day. Mark arrived at ten in glorious sunshine,
and we made a long beat for deer in the Upper Forest without
result, however, as far as getting a buck was concerned, though
we flushed several woodcocks’. When Churchill arrived he at
once began a political discussion which went on with only
occasional breaks through dinner and till midnight. ‘It was
a fine night, and we dined in the bungalow, dressed in gorgeous
Oriental garments, Clementine in a suit of embroidered silk,
purchased last year in Smyrna, Winston in one of my Bagdad
robes, George in a blue dressing-gown, and I in my Bedouin

326 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1905-1912

clothes, Mark adorned only with his wit, but that was of the
best. It recalled the most glorious night’s entertainment of
the Crabbet Club, a true feast of reason and flow of bowl.
The secrets of the Cabinet were gloriously divulged ; and those
of the Opposition front benches no less, from Home Rule to
a reconstruction of the House of Lords by common accord
after George Curzon and Asquith had been got rid of, while
George Wyndham declared with great oaths that he would
rather go to hell than see the British Constitution made
ridiculous by Single Chamber Government, at which point I
left them for my bed. Winston was very brilliant in all this,
as though he kept on at the Madeira he also kept his head, and
played with George’s wild rushes like a skilled fencer with
a greatly superior fence. He is certainly an astonishing young
man’.

Another day of excellent talk followed. The week-end went
off with a flash that justified its careful staging, but left Blunt
with the remorseful feeling an orgy always left, increased the
next day by news of the Turkish defeat at Adrianople, a defeat
for Islam : ‘I feel ashamed of having had that uproarious time
with Winston and George, two outrageous political gamblers,
just now at this tragic time when we ought all to be in sack-
cloth and ashes’.

2

Blunt seldom had to reproach himself for not responding
fully to Moslem disasters. The indictments of imperial
oppression — in books, pamphlets, letters — published by this
‘Scourge of the Oppressor’ during these years fill four volumes
and, if the shorter writings were brought together, would
easily fill five. In 1906, his Egyptian, Indian and Irish
memoirs were privately printed. A year later Fisher Unwin
agreed to publish the first volume, the Egyptian. Its appear-
ance in June brought much commendation and it was trans-
lated and published in France during that same year; but it

1905-1913 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 327

was the occasion also of many attacks. Perhaps the most
scurrilous, certainly one of the most indefensible, ending in
the severance of Blunt’s ‘epistolary connection’, with The Times
‘at least in its present phase of existence’, was a letter published
in The Times signed ‘Once a Twenty Years’ Resident in Egypt’
— a pseudonym often used by Moberly Bell, then manager
of The Times.

Two years later India Under Ripon was published. Blunt
confided in a friend that he wanted to add to it some chapters
about the India of 1909 but had been unable to get a publisher
so much as to look at them, so it appeared ‘a wasp without its
sting’. He was, however, getting very tired of controver-
sies, though the fighting, as he remarked, always did him
good.

No visible weariness certainly appeared in the zeal with
which he fought; and, in 1910, he published Gordon at
Khartoum. ‘I have been reading Gordon at Khartoum ,’ Lady
Gregory wrote him some months later, ‘and you may imagine
how it recalled those days and almost rekindled the fire of
indignation and enthusiasm. But not quite, for so many who
vexed one are gone . . . and one can’t feel anger or triumph
in a graveyard’. There were those, nevertheless, who felt much
anger on reading it. Outraged Major-Generals, who considered
that a passage in it vilified the British Army, gobbled in angry
letters to the Pall Mall Gazette and to Blunt himself, threaten-
ing to memorialize the Lord Chancellor with a view to depriv-
ing Blunt of his functions as justice of peace in the county of
Sussex. They failed to enquire whether Blunt had any such
functions. In the debate on the book in the House of Com-
mons, the representative of the War Office made a like effort
to have Blunt deprived of dignities that he had never held. It
was all very absurd — a Gilbert and Sullivan episode — and
much relished by the victim, who printed a reply two days later
in the morning papers. ‘The gallant Generals,’ he wrote hap-
pily in his journal, ‘are more angry than ever at having made
fools of themselves, and there is talk of their getting the law

328 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1905-1913

strengthened, so as to prevent criticism of the Army.’ As is
usual in such cases, the book sold extremely well.

Toward the end of 1 9 1 2, at a very opportune moment, when
the Home Rule Campaign was once more in full swing, The
Land War in Ireland was published and much more quietly,
but well received. 3 ‘It is probably the last prose work I shall
publish,’ Blunt wrote, ‘though there may be more than one
posthumous volume of my dairies’ — a not quite accurate
prophecy, for in 1919 and 1920 were published the two
volumes entitled My Diaries , of the first of which he had
finished a preliminary draft in 1904.

Aside from these four volumes, he put out also during these
years a multitude of political pamphlets and letters. In 1906
occurred the first of the series of blunders that he recorded
against Sir Edward Grey, then Foreign Secretary: Great
Britain’s claim to the whole Sinai peninsula including Akabah,
a claim made in the name of the Khedive and caused by Lord
Cromer’s and the British Government’s suspicion that the
Sultan backed by Germany intended building a railway from
Maan through Akabah. No sooner did Blunt learn of the
crisis than he advised John Redmond how to obtain the
information necessary to expose in Parliament the error of
Grey’s attitude, and he sent a letter to the King and to Grey
explaining the weakness of the British position. An epitome
of the letter appeared in the newspapers, but too late to have
any effect. Great Britain gained a victory — most unfortunately,
as Blunt pointed out, since it entrenched Germany in, and
further ousted England from, the position of counsellor to the
Ottoman Empire.

Meantime Lord Cromer’s ‘official report’ had been pub-
lished, drawing from Blunt a long article in the Manchester
Guardian condemning Cromer’s political as opposed to his
administrative policy in Egypt, explaining his relations with
the Khedive and blaming his quarrel with the Sultan. In an
accompanying leader the Manchester Guardian upheld Blunt,'
as it continued for some time to uphold him; but the other

1905-1913 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 329

papers were ‘extravagantly jingo’. A few weeks later Blunt’s
criticism of Cromer’s administration seemed justified: the
villagers of Denshawai objected to their tame pigeons being
shot by seven officers of the Army of Occupation, a quarrel
ensued, a woman and some men were killed or wounded, and
the officers were belaboured with nabuts^ and later one of them
who had run to bring help from their camp was found dead
four miles from Denshawai — killed, it was alleged at the time,
by the villagers, but afterwards pronounced overcome by heat
and sun; four of the villagers were hanged, four condemned
to penal servitude for life, and others to imprisonment — a
sentence later commuted — for terms of varying length.

Blunt set to work at once, encouraging opposition to what
he foresaw from the beginning would be a monstrous sentence. 4
The affair weighed on him ‘like a nightmare’. Worse still, no
sooner had the sentence been declared than Cromer was given
the Order of Merit. Blunt fulminated : ‘What a state of things !
Here we have a judicial crime of the largest dimensions com-
mitted by our representative in Egypt, the thing hardly
denied, quite undeniable and defaming the fair face of English
justice throughout the world, yet on the very day the hang-
ings take place our Representative is honoured with the
supreme reward of the Order of Merit!’ He was somewhat
consoled by the conviction that Cromer could not long survive
the blow that the patent injustice of the Denshawai affair had
dealt his reputation.

During two months, with Lady Anne’s help, he compiled
an article entitled ‘Atrocities of Justice under British Rule in
Egypt’. In it the Government was pilloried for its duplicity
and Sir Edward Grey for his weakness in concealing the truth
in official reports to Parliament of the Denshawai trial and
executions. Above all it was a scorching denunciation of Lord
Cromer. Six months passed. Then one April afternoon in
1907, as Blunt was fast asleep before dinner, after a day spent
in writing for the Daily News , at the paper’s request, an article
on Cromer’s annual report, a telegram arrived from Meynell.

330 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1905-1913

It announced the long-awaited tidings : Cromer had resigned.
Full awake at once and laughing so that the bed shook under
him. Blunt sent back the wire, ‘Who-Whoop!’

When the Manchester Guardian published his programme
for a new Egyptian policy a fortnight later with an approving
leader, Blunt’s spirits rose high: ‘Things look more favourable
for liberty on the Nile than has been the case for twenty years’.
He was encouraged to start on a period that lasted for several
years of intensive work for Islam and particularly for Egyptian
Nationalism. During this time he received visits from leaders
and members of the Nationalist Party: wrote effective articles
on ‘the New Situation in Egypt’ and ‘the Fiasco in Egypt’ and
manifestoes that were read and much applauded at the first
meetings of the quite ineffective National Egyptian Congress,
of which, at its second gathering, he was made Honorary
President; he also financed the publication in 1910 of Egypt’s
Ruin by Theodore Rothstein and contributed a preface to it. 5

3

For some time Blunt had thought that English and Euro-
pean machinations in the East and in Africa were leading
inevitably toward a general smash-up. By July, 1911, a
European war appeared imminent : if it did not break out at once
it would be only because England was not economically pre-
pared or because Germany was not ready for a naval war. And
though he felt war to be impossible for England, as she had
no supply of food in store — even a belief in war would ruin
her — he took his precautions. He buried £500 in gold in a box
under the only sycamore-tree in a fir wood. Two days elapsed,
and he returned to make sure that the gold had not been
disturbed. Digging down to the box, only a few inches below
the surface, he found to his astonishment a toad seated on
top of it — the medieval suggestion pleased him.

In England there were strikes, in France bread riots, and

1905-1913 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 331

in Germany warlike talk about Morocco. To complicate
matters, at the end of 19 11, Italy invaded Tripoli, declaring
war on Turkey. Word came that on the pretext that the Arab
inhabitants of the palm groves behind the town of Tripoli
joined the Turkish Army in its attack on the Italian troops,
the whole native population, men, women, and children had
been exterminated, to the number, report went, of 4,000
persons. It was the sort of barbarity that pricked Blunt most
sharply. When the editor Stead asked him to attend a meeting
of protest he took occasion to publish his reply to Stead as
part of a pamphlet — ‘The Italian Horror and How to End It.’
The only way to end the Italian atrocities, Blunt declared, was
for a power stronger than Italy, capable of taking effective
action against her, to intervene. For many reasons England
was logically that power. Blunt urged the meeting therefore,
by pressing for a clear statement of their attitude towards the
aggression, to force the Foreign Office to intervene. Sir
Edward Grey’s weakness in regard to the invasion marked,
he thought, a step on the road leading England, and Europe,
into war.

It seemed impossible to Blunt to condemn sufficiently Sir
Edward Grey’s blunders during the past five years — he called
them blunders, not acts attended by foreseen results, because
Sir Edward, ‘a worthy English country Gentleman of old-
fashioned Whig opinions’, was ‘neither brutal by nature nor
callous, but . . . singularly ignorant of any country but his
own, and . . . entirely without imagination, and woefully ill-
advised by his subordinates’. The blunders, nevertheless,
appeared to be disastrous. They had led to so parlous a situa-
tion in the East, Blunt realized, that even the break up of the
British Empire, which had bred and would continue to breed

war, might no longer bring peace. Yet for the honour of
England and as the only chance of peace, slender though it

was, the Empire must go. Even for that purpose a general
European conflict, possibly involving the annihilation of
England itself, could not be contemplated calmly by Blunt,

332 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1909-1913

who, as has been pointed out, was anti-imperialist largely be-
cause he was passionately English.

His political work during these and the two following years,
directed toward obtaining a just settlement of Imperial diffi-
culties in order to mitigate the causes of war, was attended with
little success. Its usual medium was a monthly newspaper
called Egypt , started in February, 19 n, by a committee of
English ‘radicals’ of which Blunt was chairman, edited by an
intelligent young Irishman, Frederick Ryan, under Blunt’s
direction. It was made up mainly of articles written by Blunt
himself under the pseudonyms ‘ex-Diplomaticus’ and ‘Capa-
blanca’ — articles filled with warnings and taunts of ‘I told you
so’, strident and windy but often in the right. After a career
of little over a year the paper was forbidden circulation at Cairo
on the ground that it disturbed public order. Blunt protested
loudly in letters to The Times and to Sir Edward Grey, and
primed John Dillon to put questions in Parliament. And he
went on for many months publishing and somehow dis-
seminating the paper until the death of Ryan, the editor, made
its continuance seem too difficult. Its discontinuance in
February, 1913, brought Blunt from both Egypt and India
many messages of gratitude for the services that he had
rendered to Islam by publishing ‘the truth’.

4

Occasionally during the past few years it had seemed to
Blunt that there was hope of his political dreams for the
Moslem world becoming reality; then again he felt, ‘I am
sick of Eastern politics and intend to take no part in them when
this Tripoli business is over. ... It is thirty years since I began
to battle. I feel inclined to say with Pitt: “Roll up the map
of Islam”.’ Personally, as well as politically, there is a new
tone of despondency in his diary. The entry, written with
conviction, on the last day of 1909, runs: ‘As to my own life

333

1909-1913 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES

I feel that I have come at last to its watershed, and that what-
ever happens henceforth can only be on the downward slope,
not without its little pleasures perhaps, but still with no
probability of again ascending’. At the end of 19 11, dis-
heartened not only by the ‘Tripoli business’ but by a year in
which he had been ill and lonely, he wrote, ‘I am old and
weary, and discouraged, and would if I could slink out of the
fight. I am useless in face of an entirely hostile world’. With
the outbreak of the Balkan War he feared that Islam would
never be regenerated, that his work of thirty years had been
absolutely thrown away. His ideals had not been false, but
the men in whose hands the issues lay had been ‘unworthy
and unwise’ —

And there is found no hand to ward or keep
The weak from wrong, and Pity is asleep.

He was left a solitary figure, pleading the lost cause among
Englishmen of conservative nationalism.

The old longing recurred for peace in retirement; the old
love of his own countryside drew him back there. In 1912 he
determined to retire altogether from the world to his ‘hermitage
in Sussex’.

My choice it is, and pride,

On my own lands to find my sport,

In my own fields to ride.

He had lost his taste for the activity of London. Life and
manners had changed and though a certain mellowness
tempered his judgment of them, they bewildered him. Of
almost the last large party that he went to at Strafford House
he wrote : ‘An amusing evening, as evenings there always are,
and where I met a number of ancient friends, ex-beauties, and
others who seemed pleased to see me. ... At a certain stage
in the evening, after much loud comic singing, the guests sat
down in a circle on the ground, and certain performers from
Paris danced the Danses des Apaches, which is the same which
used to be called the Cancan , with other gymnastic eccentricities

334 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1909-1913

formerly confined to the Jardin Mabille, for our amusement;
an astonishing display, which would have shocked us, I think,
even at the Mabille, in the days of the Second Empire, and
would certainly have been impossible in London in my young
days at a public dancing-hall, let alone in a drawing-room, but
which now delighted us all without a suspicion of indecorum,
young men and maidens applauding unrestrainedly, for of such
is our new kingdom of Heaven. It is not for me to find fault,
and I suppose we enjoy our lives more.’

So Blunt gave up his house in Chapel Street and took his
name off his clubs. He would submit to no persuasion. Never
for a single day did he go up again to London. But retirement,
the freedom of his estates and such new amusements as print-
ing his own and others’ verses on the small press that he had
established at Newbuildings, did not bring peace. ‘A black
melancholy is on me,’ he wrote, ‘caused by my failure every-
where in life. My poetry, my Eastern politics, my Arab horse-
breeding, were strings to my bow and they have one after
another snapped, and to-day looking through my memoirs I
perceive how slackly they are written and how unworthy they
are of survival. Yet the diaries are full of things too important
for me to destroy and they overwhelm me with despair.’ That
was the reverse of the medal ; on the other side were messages
of admiration, respect, affection — a letter from George
Wyndham, announcing his son Percy’s engagement: ‘I write
at once to you because you and one other are near to me in all
that really touches my life. I am determined to be your guest
with luck when the birds are in chorus, and in any case, when
the wild roses bloom.’ On the following day a letter from
Benares ran: ‘You say your advocacy has ceased to exercise
any influence even on Mohammedans. I say it has just begun.
They now realize the true meaning of what you told them
years ago, because they are shaking off a bit of their slavish-
ness, developed since the mutiny of 1857. Your articles in
Egypt are widely read here. They are translated and repro-
duced in the vernacular papers.’

NEW BUI LDI N GS PLACE

1909-1914 THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES 335

Neither approbation nor affection could cheer him. He had
reached that poignant state of mind for which there is no
remedy, when life must be, and is carried on to all appear-
ance as before, but with a constant underlying sense of frus-
tration and of failure. It is neither a mood of depression nor
a temporary recognition of futility. Life has been reckoned
up and the discrepancy between ambition and accomplish-
ment has been realized. Only those who are most sensitive
and who have struggled towards a standard of life higher than
that accepted by their peers are either compelled or able to
face such a reckoning. Others have not dreamed dreams of
quite so fine a texture, nor striven for a goal so distant or so
high; nor do others measure quite so closely achievement
with ideal.

Such inner despair seems to stand apart from special circum-
stances — even the happiness of friendship and love seems
unable to affect it. Yet fresh trouble has power to make it
deeper. Suddenly, on June 10th, 1913, came news of the
death of George Wyndham, ‘my nearest male relation and
very much my nearest friend’. It was a blow that struck to the
inmost fibres of his heart, bewildering in its unexpectedness,
and touching him on every side of his existence. ‘I had looked
upon him,’ he wrote later, ‘as the inheritor after me of our
family traditions, and in some measure of my family posses-
sions as trustee and knowing all. No thought had ever crossed
my mind that I could have the misfortune to survive him.’
The loss was one that could not well be measured.

S

The year after George Wyndham’s death was the nadir of
Blunt’s personal disillusionment. His mood is expressed in his
diary on December 3 1st: ‘I am alone just now here and in this
dark world I am overwhelmed with woe. I see myself as one
sees the dead, a thing finished which has lost all its importance,

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

336

1914

whatever it once had in the world. I realize how little I have
accomplished, how little I have affected the thought of my
generation in spite, as I am still convinced, of the soundness
of my view of things, and of some skill and courage in
expounding it. I have made almost no converts in Europe,
and am without a single disciple at home to continue my
teaching after I am dead. Even in the East, though my ideas
are bearing fruit and will one day be justified in act, I have
founded no personal school where my name has authority.
The consciousness that it is so wounds me with a sense of
failure and I despise myself the more for feeling it as strongly
as I do. 'Why should I mind? I ask myself, and I find no
answer.’

His pride forced him to carry on life as usual. Gradually
he achieved a new detachment and in poetry at least was
encouraged to think that he might leave a mark on the world
by something that happened early in 1914: Yeats, with whom
he was already well acquainted, Ezra Pound and Frederic
Manning proposed to give a dinner in honour of Blunt as
a poet. Blunt did not feel the honour altogether undeserved:
he believed his verse to be good — ‘or’, he said, ‘I should burn
it, also I have always held it as certain that good poetry will
sooner or later find its level and that if it remains unknown it
is because it deserves obscurity’. Nevertheless, he was sur-
prised, since he had published no verse for twelve years — and
he was touched. He suggested that the eight poets who were
to be present at the dinner should come to Newbuildings
instead of his going to them, and the date was set for January
i8th. e

As the day approached Blunt was filled with trepidation,
allayed only partially by Lord Osborne Beauclerk’s coming to
support him through the ordeal ; and on the arrival of the poets,
owing in part to Blunt’s shyness and in part to his bewilder-
ment over the whole affair, it required some time to break the
ice. A peacock, by Yeats’s request, was served up in full
plumage on the table, and they all ate two helpings of it and

1914

THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES

337

some a helping of roast beef besides, and there was good
discussion of the arts of versification afterwards on a plane
much above his comprehension, he avowed, for several of the
young men were ‘futurists’ and believed that verse should
be written without metre, rhyme or scansion, a region where
he was unable to follow. Ezra Pound read an address :

Because you have gone your individual gait,

Written fine verses, made mock of the world,

Swung the grand style, not made a trade of art,
Upheld Mazzini and detested institutions

We who are little given to respect,

Respect you, and having no better way to show it,
Bring you this stone to be some record of it.

The stone was a small marble box fashioned like an Egyptian
sepulchre with ‘a terribly paulo-post-futurist’ bas-relief en-
graved on it, by Gaudier-Brzeska, which, wrote its astonished
recipient, he had been obliged to turn with its face to the wall.
Within the casket each poet had placed a copy of one of his
works.

‘I hope,’ remarked Blunt afterwards, ‘I hope what I said on
the occasion was not too absurd. But I really did not under-
stand the address they read me or perceive till afterwards that
they had confused Arabi with Mazzini in it, and I was afraid
of committing myself in my reply to anything serious. It did
very well at the moment.’ After lunch he read them a clever
translation that he had made of ‘Don Juan’s Good Night’ by
his friend Count Gobineau — somewhat needlessly prefacing
it by the observation that he hoped the poets would not be
shocked . 7

The occasion was noticed in the Press and the poets encoun-
tered some odium for their ovation to a character so iniquitous
according to conservative opinion as Wilfrid Blunt. ‘A man
at the F.O.,’ wrote one of them, ‘ . . . says he will “never
speak to any of those poets again”.’ But the dinner had been

338 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1909-1914

a success. The poets ‘all were delighted with Blunt’; and of
them Blunt wrote, ‘they were really capital fellows, with wit
and intelligence’.

In the late spring Pound and Aldington paid him another
visit. They amused him in spite of their divergence from him
in literary ideals, and were, he thought, themselves amused.
‘I am trying to persuade them both into some kind of sanity.
I always think that in verse, or for the matter of that, in prose,
the more unconventional the subject the more elaborately
careful should be the style. Where there is neither decency
nor art, which seemed to be the cubist ideal, verse is mere
outrage.’ Along with the other Georgians, ‘the cubists’ in his
opinion lacked not only the technique which they professed to
despise, but knowledge of life to give substance to verse. The
force which their work gained later was ‘the force of ugliness’
learned from ‘the degraded trench war of the day’ and did not
improve it since ‘ugliness and cacophany will not live in
poetry’. He admitted that Rupert Brooke ‘certainly had the
making of a poet as poetry was understood twenty years
earlier’; Lady Margaret Sackville’s verse he liked; his
daughter’s book of verse reminiscent of his own, Love in a Mist ,
published in 19x3, he naturally thought very good, though
less good than her prose volume published two years earlier
on Toy Dogs and Their Ancestry. But even Masefield, whose
Salt Water Ballads and The Everlasting Mercy put him first
among poets of his generation, would never do any perfect work.

Of the poets of his own generation who were still living he
thought no better. The poetry of C. M. Doughty with whom
he kept up an occasional exchange of notes and whose Arabia
Deserta he had been among the first to welcome, introducing
it to Morris and Burne-Jones, he considered the worst, as his
prose is the best of the nineteenth century. In Hardy’s
Dynasts he found nothing that had any business to be called
poetry. Robert Bridges’s work he cared for not at all.

His own poetry he had intended to leave in the hands of
Lady Gregory and George Wyndham, his literary executors,

THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES

1914

339

After George Wyndham’s death Lady Gregory suggested that
Blunt himself should arrange for the publication of as much
of his work as he wished ever to be given to the public. To
this he agreed, stipulating only that his longer political and
philosophical poems should not be excluded. They were as
much a part of himself and of his view of things as were the
Sonnets of Proteus ; and if, he added, ‘my poetry has any value
I feel it lies in its sincerity, for I have really never written any
verse for writing’s sake only as a way of expressing myself,
and I have felt as deeply and strongly about certain aspects of
what are called world politics as I have about love. My poetry
has been my justification in both fields of my active life, not
the pursuit of an art for art’s sake’.

Contrary to Blunt’s expectation, Macmillan agreed to the
complete edition and by the end of June, 19x4, it was ready
to appear in two volumes. But for some reason, and a little
to Blunt’s relief as he was absorbed in writing The Religion of
Happiness, publication was put off by Macmillan till the end
of October. Though by that time the Great War had broken
out the collection received a good deal of attention. When
notices were hostile it was on political rather than literary
grounds. Blunt was content. Behind his poetry lay the philo-
sophy of life drawn from wide experience, which he regarded
as the sine qua non , and he had worked hard at poetic technique,
‘harder perhaps than any of my contemporaries’. So the
two volumes contained enough good poetry he felt — and
rightly — to bear comparison with most Victorian work and
might find a permanent place as a quarry wherein anthologists
would dig which ‘is all the immortality poets can hope for’.

A certain amount of hitherto unpublished work was included
in the edition. The four ‘Paraphrases From the French’,
pointed records of human folly and cruelty, and many of the
‘Later Sonnets’ and ‘Later Lyrics’, notably the acrostics in
which the first letters of the lines spell the name of the person
to whom the poem was written, appear for the first time. The
‘Quatrains of Life’ is made up of the ‘Quatrains of Youth’,

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

340

1914

published by Henley and George Wyndham in 1 898, in which
the poet answers the question c what has my youth been that
I love thus?’ and a new series of quatrains in which he asks
‘what has my life been?’ and replies:

Nay, my life is good.

Dear life, I love thee, now thou art subdued.

Thou hast fled the battle, cast thine arms away,
And so art victor of the multitude.

Thou art forgotten wholly of thy foes,

Of thy friends wholly, these alike with those.

One garden of the world thy kingdom is
Walled from the wicked, and there blooms thy rose.

At the end of the collection, a fitting close to his poetic
work, stands ‘The Wisdom of Merlyn’, begun during the
summer after his Irish imprisonment. ‘Ancient of days though
he be,’ Blunt speaks, ‘with the rage of his soul untamed’, ‘all his
wisdom of life’, addressing himself

only to hearts that are strong,

To him that hath courage to climb, who would gather time’s
samphire flowers, who would venture the crags among.

To her who would lesson her soul to fear, with love for
sermon and song.

Age has not made him prudent, for the philosophy of the
young poet of the Sonnets of Proteus is repeated and re-enforced
by the old poet who has found it good: ‘Cast thy whole heart
away’. Act! Give!

Where doubt is, do ! Thou shalt stumble in thine
endeavour,

Ay, till thy knees be sore, thy back with the arrows of grief,
and thou stand with an empty quiver.

Yet shall thy heart prevail through its pain, for pain is a

mastering lever.

1 9 1 4
In short:

THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES

34i

Merlyn’s message is this: he would bid thee have done
with pride. . . .

Take thy joy with the rest . . .

And lay thee down when thy day is done content with the
unrevealed.

As always it is the fulness of life that counts with Blunt :

Let us thank the dear gods for our madness, the rush of
the blood in our veins, the exuberant pulsings of time.

Though he continued to write verse as long as he lived, in
these volumes are to be found his best poems.

The latest of them is the elegy, ‘The Happy Warrior’,
written soon after his death in 1913 in memory of George
Wyndham, whose zest for life had all but equalled Blunt’s own :

Here lay his victory. Not flowers alone
Nor fruits were his,

But the world’s sadnesses

He gathered also, its loves lost and gone,

The tragic things.

The occasional poems written after this merited only the
private printing which they received at Newbuildings on the
Jubilee Press. Blunt himself explained: ‘I am still able to
write prose . . . But I shall write no more verse. That needs
an overflow of vital force which cannot be renewed.'

CHAPTER XVI

THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM

i

‘History is a jolly thing and English history perhaps the
jolliest of all’, observed Blunt on Waterloo Day, 1916, when
the legend was rife that the English and French had always
been friends and always hated the Germans. The ironies of
the war years disgusted as well as amused him, from the petty
foolishness of war-time hysteria — on the same day he received
a message from his cousin Gerald Blunt advising him to breed
wild rabbits in his garden as provision against possible famine
and another from a neighbour requesting him to kill off his
rabbits as they injured the tenants’ crops and would bring on
famine — to the serious inconsistencies of Governmental pro-
paganda. The use of England’s treaty with Belgium as a
reason for entering the war seemed to him nonsense. England’s
real responsibility arose from having encouraged Belgium to
fight when England could not give her adequate help.
Belgium had long since broken her guarantee of neutrality;
she had fortified her cities, kept a large army, and for some
years before the war had sided obviously with the Triple
Entente against Germany. When invited by the editor of the
Nation to sign a manifesto headed ‘Britain’s Destiny and Duty’
he replied by asking: ‘Where was Grey’s respect for treaty
guarantees when he acquiesced in Austria’s annexation of
Bosnia, in Italy’s raid on Tripoli and the dismemberment of
Turkey after the Balkan Warp Where especially has been his
respect for his own written guarantee of Persia signed by
himself?’

Blunt had longed for England to remain neutral. Not only

342

1914-1922 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 343

was Belgium unworthy of support — her worst offence in his
eyes being, of course, her commercial exploitation of the Congo
region — but so was France, once

the most serious, and perhaps the best
Of all the nations which have power with men.

She too had ceased now to scorn hypocrisy. As for Germany:
on August 3rd he wrote, ‘for forty-five years I have loathed
the Germans as few Frenchmen have had the constancy to
loath them, but to-day I find my sympathies almost with them
for at least they are acting like men who know their minds and
pay not a jot of respect to the conventions of diplomacy.
To-morrow, the fourth of August, is the anniversary of the
Battle of Worth. I expect the first battle in the present cam-
paign will be fought on the same day and by design’. Five
days later he was outraged by the appointment of Kitchener,
the hero of the Mahdi’s head and concentration camps in
South Africa, as virtual dictator in England.

The Allies’ reply to President Wilson in January, 1917,
seemed to him hypocritical to the last degree, especially
because they declared that they had done nothing to provoke
the war, had no selfish interest at stake, and were working only
for the independence of peoples and the good of humanity.
‘These principles,’ declared Blunt, ‘are to be exemplified every-
where apparently except just in the British Empire as to which
not a word is said of a willingness to forgo their annexations
of Egypt and Cyprus, or to restore the German colonies in
Africa. There is no word of the Italians relinquishing their
conquest of Tripoli, the French their conquest of Morocco,
while Constantinople is to be taken from the Turks, including
Gallipoli which England failed so egregiously to capture by
force of arms.’ Blunt despaired: ‘Where is the use of talk?
The object of the letter is clear, to raise a new war loan which
was opened yesterday.’

The political game seemed to him to be played with less
sincerity than ever. 1 When the Sultan Abdul Hamid died in

344 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

1918 Blunt observed dryly, ‘I had almost added “good old
man!” So wicked has the world grown since his comparatively
innocuous day’. The loyalty to the Empire of the Nationalist
leaders of Ireland and India was a further disillusionment: ‘it
knocks the bottom out of the whole Nationalist position’.
Almost alone of Irish leaders Sir Roger Casement remained
faithful to the Irish cause, the cause of his own country, as
opposed to that of the British Empire, and for this Blunt
honoured him. Casement had visited him early in 1914 and
inspired him with confidence : if any man could effectively lead
the Irish Volunteer Movement, with which Blunt was in
sympathy, Casement appeared to be that man. When he was
imprisoned for treason in 1916 Blunt held him to be no more
guilty than any captured enemy. He had been fighting for his
country’s honour not for that of the British Empire. And his
speech on June 29th seemed to Blunt ‘the noblest apologia
ever made by a political prisoner before his judges in the whole
history of Irish or any other national war for freedom’.

In accordance with Casement’s views he refused to help in
obtaining a commutation of Casement’s sentence based on the
plea of insanity, since that would cheat him of his enviable
martyrdom. But he upheld a plea based on the grounds of the
grave national danger his execution would present in Ireland
and of Casement’s good work in Putumayo. He was touched
to hear that Casement’s chief reading after the trial was his
‘Secret History Series’ and to find at the end of a pencilled
letter smuggled out of prison the message, ‘give my love to
Wilfrid Blunt’. After Casement’s execution he wrote a long
‘Ballad of Sir Roger Casement’ never published and interesting
only as a credo showing the complete consistency of Blunt’s
own attitude.

Blunt himself took no public action against the war or war
measures. He realized now as he had realized in the Egyptian
War of 1882 that England would tolerate a dissentient
minority only if it did not interfere with the majority. To
undertake any public crusade for peace was useless. He tried

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 345

to discourage a young soldier whom Lady Margaret Sackville
brought to see him from preaching pacifism, although he
sympathized deeply with his feeling. ‘A pacifist position at
the present moment,’ he remarked, ‘is that of a sane man shut
up in a railway-carriage full of lunatics. It is wisest to sit still
till the train stops, pretending to be asleep.’

But privately he did all that he could to mitigate the
inhumanity of the war, subscribing to the work of groups such
as the Society of Friends and professing himself willing to
join in any plan to help against the ‘repulsive treatment’
accorded conscientious objectors. To stem the undisciplined
rush of so-called patriotism he could only urge those with
whom he came in contact at least to wage their war with a
sense of reality and intelligence. When, late in August, 19x4,
he learned that his stableman Ike had been sneaking off at
intervals to the nearby village of Coolham to drill, Blunt pointed
out to him sharply that there could be no objection to his
enlisting if he thought it right, but that such amateur drillings
as those at Coolham were childish and quite useless. Nor did
he oppose anyone who felt it necessary to go to the front
though he made clear his own scorn of the attitude of most of
his friends who regarded war as a high form of sport not to be
missed. ‘I believe,’ he wrote wearily, ‘I am the only person left
in England without this feeling, I mean among people of my
own class, or who has the sanity to thank Heaven I am too
old to take part in the adventure.’

He refused to sign warlike manifestoes; and he refused to
contribute war poems to the many anthologies that were being
compiled. In answer to a proposed scheme for turning
Woodgaters — a farm on the Newbuildings estate — into a kind
of agricultural school for soldiers, he replied that he was not
interested in soldiers being brought to settle on the land in
Sussex unless they had been farm labourers there before the
war. He did not want, he said, a lot of foreigners from the
North of England upsetting native Sussex ways and introduc-
ing intensive cultivation.

346 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

When, however, Lord Goschen and the War Agricultural
Committee decided that he must cultivate forty acres of the
Newbuildings land, he made no objection. He preferred the
weald in its native state, and knew that it was too poor and
water-logged to bear crops except after several years’ treatment
at great expense. But the project, he remarked with sweet
reasonableness, ‘must be regarded as one of the follies of War
which we have to submit to’.

During the last months of 1914 and the early part of 1915’
when the English Government was in doubt about the way in
which the great Mohammedan populations of the Empire
would receive certain of their proposed actions, Blunt was
urged to republish The Future of Islam. But during the War
he republished no political writings and wrote only a few new
political statements. Privately he worked often on his theories
of the proper settlement of the world at the end of the War.

Over two decades earlier he had written :

I too have dreamed a dream which I would fain essay to
interpret

A dream of infinite love, which, if my hour of wit
were proved,

Should stand my message to the world, a voice of power
for ever,

Binding the generations new to the past ages dumb.

This dream of peace was at the root of his nationalism — only
in a world of nations, amicable because not rapacious, could
peace be hoped for — and by the end of 1915 all hope had
vanished. ‘The only possible permanent peace,’ he wrote then,
‘is when one Power has made itself master of the rest, nor yet
even then to anybody’s advantage.’ There could be no justice
within an Empire, for, as Jemal-ed-Din had said long ago,
‘justice is found where equal forces meet’. The possibility of
even temporary peace lay in the Allies obtaining enough victory
over Germany to satisfy ‘our military vanity, but not enough
to leave Germany at our mercy’. And when formal peace was

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 347

declared the situation was equally desperate because, said
Blunt, nobody would admit that the war had its origin in the
Anglo-French Entente of 1904 and the Foreign Office still
made the alliance with France the pivot of its policy.

2

From the moment that hostilities were openly declared
Blunt had seen in the war a triumph of all that he most detested
and had felt that whichever way things went disaster would
result for those regions of the world which interested him
most. He feared particularly the dismemberment of the
Ottoman Empire and the fate of Islam, should Constantinople
fall into the hands of Russia. As for Egypt, while the war was
on there was nothing to do about it. It was still caught in the
net in which it had been enmeshed for the past thirty-two
years. He considerably surprised his friends by prophesying
that in the end it would be taken over from the English by
Italy.

As the peace negotiations progressed they struck him as a
desperate game of double or quits. ‘Indeed the nations of
Europe remind me of nothing so much as of the gamblers
I used to watch in the old days at Homburg sitting at the
Trente et quarante tables, winning here and losing there, but
all of them threatened with bankruptcy and increasing their
stakes the more money they lost.’ It seemed to him imperative,
especially as Lloyd George’s cry of ‘hang the Kaiser’ was heard
on all sides, that the public should be shown the events leading
to the war in a truer light than any official history was likely
to cast upon them.

To this end he published My Diaries , the final two volumes
of the ‘Secret History Series’, and appended to the second
book a table of the ‘chronology of events leading to the Great
War of 1914 and especially to England’s quarrel and war with
Turkey’. The table made clear, he thought, that the war had

348 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

its origin in the East and particularly in British imperial action
in the East. It began in 1875 with the Khedive Ismail’s sale of
the Suez Canal shares to the British Government, but showed
that the first important step taken by England towards the
future war was the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882. To
keep Egypt England began her ententes with France and
Russia and later Italy.

When the first volume, ‘The Scramble for Africa’ covering
the years 188 8-1900, appeared early in May, 1 9 1 9, it justified
Lady Gregory’s opinion that it would have a greater success
than any previous volume of the ‘Secret History Series’. The
Press was on the whole commendatory and it sold well. For
the second volume, ‘The Coalition Against Germany’ covering
the years from 1900—14, that appeared a year later, Lady
Gregory was a less sure prophet. To lighten the book which
was overweighted with politics and shadowed by the war,
Blunt, she argued, had put in some personal sketches and
scandals which it would be as well without. In the event, it was
as great a success as the first, going beyond all expectations.
One letter about it, Blunt remarked gleefully, could hardly have
been exceeded in praise had it been addressed to Boswell on
his life of Johnson. Far from resenting their inclusion in the
book as Lady Gregory had feared they would, many of the
persons in question seemed definitely pleased, the digs
administered to their friends more than atoning for those given
themselves.

As in the other volumes of the ‘Secret History Series’
people and events, comments and gossip are mingled in
reminiscences of singular pungency. No English memoirs
make better reading. Blunt’s sense of character brings alive
the world of the day as it passes through his pages — the poet
laureate, Alfred Austin, caricatured as ‘a little cock-sparrow of
a man’; King Edward VII symbolized by the great beech-tree
at Newbuildings Place which was uprooted by the storms fol-
lowing his death, ‘quite rotten at the root, but one half of it
clothed in its spring green’. The social scene is filled in

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 349

regardless of discretion and with amused understanding of the
views of the dramatis person a. Oriental and Western, high and
low alike. Sheykh Mohammed Abdu’s brother described to
Blunt the Khedive’s ball where for the first time he beheld
women in European evening dress, ‘naked nearly to the waist’ :
‘ “Who are they?” he inquired, outraged and confused. They
told me “These are the wives of some of our English officials”.
“And their husbands,” I asked, “do they permit them to go
out at night like this?” “Their husbands,” they answered,
“are here”, and they pointed out to me Mr. Royle, the Judge
of Appeal, before whom I had often pleaded, a serious man
and very stern . . . dancing with one of these naked ladies, gay
and smiling and shameless, like a young man. “And he is
here,” I said, “to see his wife thus unclothed? And he dances
with her publicly?” “That,” they answered, “is not his wife,
it is the wife of another.” ’ He saw Lord Cromer participating
in the orgy, and the Khedive. He himself was ‘jammed close
to two of the naked ones’. ‘Terribly ashamed,’ he fled, taking
his friends with him. This anecdote, like many others,
cunningly reveals the racial and personal idiosyncrasies
underlying public policy and its failures. Blunt was right
in thinking his memoirs necessary, however ‘queer’, read-
ing for both the social and political historian. And he felt
his opinion justified when the Bibliotheque Nationale. re-
quested My Diaries as ‘an historic monument connected with
the war’.

Little attention, however, was paid to the serious purport
of My Diaries even by those who read them with keenest
enjoyment. Blunt’s view of historical causes and effects
carried no warning for his readers, though while the war was
still on people began to address him as a sage and to regard
Newbuildings, he said in 1916, ‘as a kind of Noah’s Ark
riding calmly on the waters of the flood. This is amusing.
Certainly everybody else has made a fool of himself while I
have held my tongue’ — a complacent statement to which truth
bound him to add later, ‘in so far as I have thought wise’.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

35 °

1914-1922

When he did permit himself to speak during the war he
had a way of striking down to bedrock that, surprising and
often distressing as it might be, made those who listened feel
that he had achieved, in Merlyn’s words, ‘the fruit of
wisdom’.

His friends escaped the quandary created by this general
air of wisdom combined with opinions which they did not trust
by saying, as one of them put it, ‘you are so differently built
in your frame of mind, a mixture of philosophy and in-
difference’. Reading between the lines Blunt realized that,
had he been twenty-five instead of seventy-six, they would
have dubbed him slacker. ‘There is an advantage in being
old.’

By casual acquaintances and those who knew him only
through hearsay he was pictured as an old man, arrogant and
aloof, watching the world go round, and like a spider gloating
over the flies caught in the web of disasters he had foretold.
And by many he is still regarded as unpatriotic and unfeeling.
No doubt he enjoyed a certain vindictive satisfaction when his
prophecies fell true, but he was not unsympathetic. The
deaths of his friends’ sons were recorded by him starkly, too
evidently grievous to need elaboration. They left him ‘with
the same angry feeling against the war and the waste of
enthusiasm entailed by it on young men of this generation,
choosing the best and most lovable for its victims’. Only a
few months after the outbreak of war he had realized with
lonely perspicacity that even those who survived were doomed :
‘I don’t know what will become of all these young men when
the war is over. It will have spoilt them for other occupa-
tions, those that come out of it alive.’

The sacrifices of war were not to him as to most of his
friends made to a glorious end but, doubly bitter, made to no
purpose or worse than no purpose. The consciousness of
holding views unlike those of his friends increased his sense
of isolation. Age, which had taught him calmness in face of
particular disasters, in some ways deepened his distress: ‘I am

i 9 I4 _i 9 22 the war AND SQUIREDOM 351

too old to adapt myself to new conditions. I can only sit
helplessly on the floor and stare in front of me, staggered and
indignant, knowing whatever further happens I can have no
place in the world which will arise out of the ruins of
this.’

The destruction of the old world was hateful to him — the loss
of all individual freedom and all possibility of that quiet life
which seemed to him the only thing in the world really worth
having and which England had possessed beyond any other
European nation. And the springing up of a new world in
which people would have different brains from ours with
different ideals of beauty and romance and morality offended
his aesthetic sense. The American world of O. Henry’s
stories, he feared, would engulf England, a world whose virtues
were as ugly as its vices and where there would be no upper
class but one of wealth and everyone would be equal in a
common drinking-bar vulgarity. ‘People of the usual Yankee
type, well meaning but altogether wearisome’, such as some
of the visitors to Newbuildings, would bring their manners
into Europe with their money, calling it Democracy. ‘I am
not sure’, he concluded, ‘whether it would not be a lesser evil
to pass under the aristocratic harrow of the Hun.’

3

Small vanities and larger faults Blunt may have had, a fire
of impatient egotism that burst out frequently even in his
seasoned old age, but the pattern of his life conforms with the
design of the perfect life which he had outlined long ago in
the preface to the fourth edition of The Sonnets of Proteus:
‘Youth in feeling — manhood in battle — old age in meditation.’
To him, naturally, meditation did not mean dreaming in idle-
ness — after a lifetime of activity that would have been
impossible.

352 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

And what were life unlabouring, life even here in this dear
Eden,

Were there no toil? Eternal perfectness in idle round

Is God’s sole lot to taste, not ours whom rage of hope
possesses

And Time disturbs with tales of change, and dark
oblivion goads.

Meditation meant a quiet drawing together of earlier interests
mellowed by the light of experience and reflection. He turned
back with increased understanding to the history of his life
in the diaries which he was putting into shape for publication.
He laboured again on the history of the Crabbet Arabian stud,
only the first chapter of which was privately printed, and on a
history of the Blunt estates, particularly the Crabbet and
Newbuildings lands, the first volume of which was also
privately printed.

The outbreak of war and probably his still poignant sense
of the loss of George Wyndham had sent him back to writing
with renewed interest the prose counterpart to ‘the Wisdom
of Merlyn’, his Religion of Happiness , begun in 1904. He
wished to leave a true record of his position towards religion
and especially a future life, the dream of which, he said, has
misled all thought for thousands of years. The title is ex-
plained in ‘the Quatrains of Life’ —

Know then, all wisdom is but happiness.

So thou art happy, there is none more sage
Than thou of the wise seven famed of Greece.

Long ago in Griselda he had recognized the elusive quality
of happiness :

Happiness is not

A merchandise men buy or leave unbought
And find again. It is a wild bird winging
Its way through heaven, in joyous circles ringing,
Aloft at its own will. Then, ere we wist,

353

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM

It stooped and sat a moment on our wrist,

And fondled with our fingers, and made play
With jess and hood as if it meant to stay.

And we, if we were wise and fortunate,

And if the hour had been decreed of fate,

Seized the glad bird and held it in our hand,

And forced it to obey our least command,

Knowing that never more, if not made sure,

It would come again to voice, or sign, or lure.

Now he came to the conclusion that ‘happiness depended on
two things with me, being out of pain and being with those
I loved, but as it is not given to everybody to enjoy these
things it is no good trying to make general rules. All we can
really affirm is that the natural world is on the whole a happy
world and that man is a disturber in it with his tire-
some intelligence and that death is the best ending for it after
all.’

There his conclusions would have rested had he not begun
to read the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. They
stirred him to further effort. Though Schopenhauer’s philo-
sophy was too pessimistic for him wholly to accept, he found it
always logical with cold convincing logic, and all that was
valuable in Nietzsche’s philosophy he ascribed to Schopenhauer.
Nietzsche’s own theory of the superman who shall find happiness
in a Will to Power he thought absurd. ‘There is nothing in
nature to show that violence, however successful, adds to
happiness.’ The lion is no happier than the lamb, he argued.
The real reason of man’s unhappiness is his forethought which
forces him to work instead of play, to raid upon his fellow beasts
instead of taking the kindly fruits of the earth as they come
his way. The more he schemes for his comfort the more
uncomfortable he becomes. He is the only one who grieves
without physical pain. Were he ten times superman he would
be only ten times the more unhappy.

In his early illnesses Blunt had entertained himself, to the

354 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

wonder of his friends, by reading the Book of Job which, with
the Song of Solomon , he thought worth all the rest of human
literature. He returned to it now in connection with his
Religion of Happiness as the point of departure for a study of
the Bible and the Church Fathers, a last attempt to persuade
himself of the truth of Christianity, above all of Roman
Catholicism — or, perhaps, a last test of his unbelief. But it
led him to the conclusion that ‘all this about the “Aspects”
of God is the veriest nonsense, so too is the whole scheme of
Christianity’ — a view from which he probably never again
departed. It may well have been responsible for his failure
to finish the Religion of Happiness , though increasing physical
disability undoubtedly played a part. After his long illness
in 1917 most of his literary work had to be done by dictation,
to which philosophic reflection lends itself less easily than do
records of fact and opinion.

After 1917 too, he was obliged to curtail many of his active
pursuits and even on the few occasions when he hired a motor-
car or journeyed in a railway carriage he seldom went beyond
the Sussex borders. Fortunately he could say with truth that
‘a love of English country things and more especially of the
actual clay soil of Sussex, with its deep hedgerows and its
deeper oak woods, is still with me the most permanent instinct
of my heart. I can hardly imagine happiness now in my old
age without some such local anchorage, and I find it difficult
to recognize as beautiful any scenery not that of our weald.
So far indeed do I carry the feeling that I resent the intrusion
of outside praisers of its loveliness, men who have come to it
as strangers and have dared to sing of it as though it were
their own.’

Naturally, then, he resented The Retworth Rosy , a small
volume in which, with Kipling, Belloc and Francis Thompson,
he figured among the poets of Sussex. ‘As a fact,’ he remarked
with some acerbity, ‘I am the only one of them born in the
county or with any family connection in it.’ And after a drive
to Bignor and the Roman Villa he grumbled absurdly, ‘I resent

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 355

these Roman remains in Sussex, they have no business to be
here, outlandish, imperialistic’.

Blunt had become, as he had always wished to be, ‘the
Squire’. Nothing that took place on his lands escaped his
paternal vigilance. In x 9 1 5 on the anniversary of his mother’s
death he had been able to declare with pride that, though there
had been little in his life of which she would approve, in the
management of the estate, at least, he had succeeded as well
as his father had and was, he thought, ‘as well beloved, no
small thing after all’. But his position entailed many obliga-
tions :

Life’s law is this :

Pleasure is duty; duty pleasure
In equal measure.

An estate in England inherited from ancestors, he explained
to his grandson Anthony, was a little kingdom where the
owner was in some sort responsible for the happiness of all its
inhabitants and had a duty of preserving it, no less than a king
had, and of transmitting it to his descendants.

It was the squire’s business to see to the shooting. Blunt
shot Worth Forest, went partridge shooting at Newbuildings,
and rabbiting with his grandchildren — often trundled in his
‘perambulator’, a bath chair drawn by a scrubby little pony
with broken knees named Job, from which, to his unconcealed
delight, his guests testify, he shot astonishingly straight and
quickly. On summer evenings he drove about the countryside
behind his Arabs not only ‘genealogically bent’ on gathering
materials for his histories, but seeing to it that his estates
were in order. Interested as he was in bettering the living
conditions of his tenants, reform to him was not improvement
if it did not leave the tenants happier as well as healthier. 2
However heartily he agreed with his agent that the cottages at
Dragon’s Corner were poor and old-fashioned he refused to
condemn 'them since they were loved by their inhabitants
whom ‘it would be cruel to evict’. His kindness, like that of

356 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

most really kind people not worn on his sleeve, sprang from
a sensitive imagination as much as from intention. He under-
stood the traditions and individual foibles of both tenants and
servants, respected their special knowledge, found interest
and amusement in their shrewd talk.

Though Pompey — a little black boy bought in the Cape
Verde Islands in 1867 — was the only one of his servants
acquired as a slave, they all accorded him the unquestioning
obedience that he expected. At eleventh hour notice they
would provide, in some lovely place in the woods or fields,
meals whose excellence was long remembered by visitors,
straw-coloured wine and delicious simple food set out on the
coarse clean cloth; or, when it became impossible for Blunt
to go far from the house, in the paddock among the daffodils
when the almond-trees were in bloom or under the trees in
the Jubilee Garden, ‘a peacock coming to be fed, and a black
spotted lamb to look on, and Dot the favourite spaniel setting
up a loud cry for food’. The ordering of daily life simply and
naturally was with Blunt a fine art. He knew how to extract
the last drop of individuality from his surroundings.

George Wyndham once said to him that ‘to be happy is to
be able to say I want and I won’t’. By that criterion so far as
his tenants and household were concerned. Blunt was happy,
for his rule was that of the feudal lord of ancient times, he had
only to speak and his wishes were carried out.

In his family relationships Blunt’s imperious character was
less fortunate. This is not the place to examine the estrange-
ment from his wife and daughter which had begun so far back
as 1896, or his complete break with Lady Anne in 1906, or
his frequent serious differences with his daughter from 1908
onwards. The conflict of temperaments, all three so little
simple and pliable, was perhaps inevitable. ‘Some of these
days’, Blunt once said, ‘the whole story of my domestic life
will be published, if there is any demand on the public’s part
to know about it, and meanwhile it must rest where it is —
qui s' excuse s'accuse .’ But family dissensions so distinctly

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 357

coloured his life in its later years that his reconciliation with
Lady Anne in 19x5 and his final rupture with his daughter
should be recorded.

A first meeting for over eight years took place between
Blunt and Lady Anne in Worth Forest early in 1915'. Blunt
was deeply impressed by her then as ‘a noble and pathetic
figure’ and he was glad to feel that he might again be able
‘to protect and help her’. Other meetings followed, a joint
inspection of Lady Anne’s part of the Arabian stud at Crabbet
and even of the stud at Newbuildings. Her Ladyship, said
Blunt, ‘is far more active than I am and with a better use of all
her faculties, her head clearer than I ever remember it. There
is every prospect of her living for another ten years and it
will be for everyone’s good that she should do so.’ To Blunt
it soon seemed that all things between them had been settled
amicably, in especial the fate of the Arabian stud which they
owned jointly. Lady Anne established herself on the Crabbet
estate near her daughter, going out as usual in the autumn of
1915 to Egypt for the winter. There she lived in her own
quarters, ‘the pink house’, in the garden of Sheykh Obeyd, en-
grossed in the management of the part of the stud which had
been left in Egypt, a time-consuming business after the death of
her factotum Mutlak in 1916. At the big house in the
garden, Philip Napier, son of Blunt’s old friend Mark Napier,
and his wife were living, and upon them she depended for
affectionate society. Though she went seldom to Cairo,
visitors were constantly coming from there to her. It was no
uncommon sight to see Lady Anne in the paddock showing
her horses to a group of young officers eager to pay her their
respects.

Repeatedly Blunt besought Lady Anne to return to England,
but always there was some reason why she could not. ‘If I
have one wish now to ask of fate,’ he wrote, ‘it would be to
see her here again and it is precisely the one wish I shall not see
granted, for she, it is clear, has made up her mind to stay on
through the summer in Egypt and it is hardly likely that both

358 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

of us will last another winter.’

She was then seventy-eight and he, seventy-five. The
reason she gave for not returning was the difficulty of getting
from Egypt to England during the War.*

Blunt was more than ever ‘disposed to look gloomily on
the future’. A sale had been announced of a portion of the
Crabbet estate. He was anxious to avert this, or, failing that,
to buy back, as he succeeded in doing, Frogshole Farm and
Little Blackwater. These were dear to him because they were
the fields that his brother Francis had kept with Worth Forest
for his own shooting and where Blunt had spent so many
happy days with his sister Alice angling the stream.

This at least is true,

That in the Mole are trout, and many too,

As I have often proved with rod and line
From boyhood up, blest days of pins and twine!

How many an afternoon have our hushed feet
Crept through the alders where the waters meet,

Mary’s and mine, and our eyes viewed the pools
Where the trout lay, poor unsuspecting fools,

And our hands framed their doom — while overhead
Its orchestra of birds the blackbird led.

Though he was a little consoled by holding the two farms
safely again in his own hands a breach had been created that
was never healed . 3 Indeed when Lady Anne died it was

* It having been represented to the Publishers that passages on this page and
elsewhere suggest that the estrangement between Blunt and his daughter Lady
Wentworth and her mother was due to quarrels about the stud and to unreasonable
conduct on her part, and that the necessity for the sale of the Crabbet Estate was
caused by her mismanagement, and that she treated Blunt unfairly, these passages
have now been withdrawn, and the Publishers acknowledge that any suggestions
to the effect stated are without foundation.

r 9 i 4 -i 9 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 359

widened by a new and even more violent quarrel concerning
the Arab stud.

After Lady Anne’s departure for Egypt she and Blunt
exchanged many long and friendly letters, often concerned
with the future disposal of the stud. In mid-June 1 9 1 7, on the
death of her niece, Mary Wentworth, Lady Anne came into
the title of Baroness Wentworth. 4 Twenty years ago, Blunt
confessed, the succession would have been a matter of vain-
glory to him, and as it was he felt a certain satisfaction in it, if
only as an ornament on the family tree and giving him the
right to place her arms as a scutcheon of pretence upon his
Blunt and Scawen shield. 5 He was interested chiefly, however,
in the fact that the necessity of making her legal claim to the
peerage might be a means of bringing Lady Anne home
from Egypt.

But on December 6th, a wire from the Napiers told him
that Her Ladyship was alarmingly ill. ‘I had been envying
her the delight of being (at Sheykh Obeyd) in December,’
said Blunt, ‘the most perfect month and wishing I was with
her, but this at her age looks very like the end. Ai de mil’
Ten days later came the news of Lady Anne’s death on
December iyth. Only then did he learn that she had been ill
for a good many weeks, cared for devotedly by the Napiers,
her courage so indomitable that she had acknowledged no
suffering nor loneliness nor allowed anyone in England to be
told of her danger until almost the end. She was buried in the
Nuns’ burial ground at the Jebel Ahmar, as she would have
liked, on the edge of the Eastern desert, and a tombstone
designed by Blunt erected there. 6

Her death, though not wholly unexpected, was a heavy
blow to him. ‘Your letter,’ he wrote to his sister-in-law soon
after the news came, ‘consoles me, as far as it is possible I
should be consoled, for what is an immense loss to me, far
more than it would have been five or ten years ago, for I had
latterly been counting on spending the evening of our days
together and making up for much lost time of affection and

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

360

1914-1922

completing arrangements we both had at heart.’ He was so
certain of their agreement that Lady Anne’s will, written six
months before her death, astonished him. It contained only
one mention of him — a bequest of the stud books — written in
‘harsh and mechanical language’ with no suggestion that the
estrangement from him had given place to the old affection,
and it disposed of her property, particularly the stud, in a way
not at all in accord with what he had understood to be her
plan.

Her part of the stud was left to her two granddaughters
in trust; two important bequests that she had promised to
persons outside the immediate family were omitted; and she
had not left to Blunt the manuscript books about the Arab
horse and certain other papers as she had agreed. The will
was quite out of harmony both with her own recent letters to
him and with what he had understood to be her intentions
when she left England. It seemed to him to show that even
in the best of women the sense of justice cannot be relied on.
Some comfort he drew from the fact that she had written to
his cousin not long before her death saying ‘the blessing I
earnestly desire for myself, apart from the successful ending of
the war, is that I may live to find Wilfrid and Judith and the
children and myself all united’. And a message sent through
Napier as she was dying, although it altered nothing, made
him happier, for it said that Lady Anne’s wish had been to
make arrangements for the stud to fit in with his last pro-
posals concerning it.

Yet not many weeks later Blunt was given a list of mares
that her Ladyship had offered for sale to an American shortly
before her death comprising practically the whole breeding
stud. The illogicality of her conduct was bewildering: ‘Here
was Anne, the noblest of beings and with all excellencies of
mind, who had two strong objects in view, the one to per-
petuate and provide for the Arab stud as an institution of great
public importance, the other to restore family unity between
me and Judith and the children, and who wearied Heaven

r 9 1 4 " 1 9 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 361

with her prayers for this last object during the last year
especially of her life, and yet who in the midst of it puts her
hand to a will which could not but accentuate all the causes of
family quarrel and go near to wrecking the stud. Truly one
needs to be a cynic about human wisdom whether male or
female.’

Although he had observed just before their reconciliation
that Lady Anne was ‘very like her grandmother Lady Byron,
forgetting nothing and forgiving nothing’, not until her
diaries, extending from 1913 to the time of her reconciliation
with him, were put into his hands did he suspect that her actions
in regard to the stud sprang from more than a misunder-
standing. The diaries were written with a bitterness against
him of which he had had no suspicion and made very painful
reading for him. They destroyed for him the ideal picture
he had made of Lady Anne’s character. Why, he asked, did
she give them to me?

After Lady Anne’s death the part of the stud which had
been at Sheykh Obeyd was sold on Blunt’s advice by the
trustees to an American ; and the sale of the old Sheykh Obeyd
garden at the end of January not only enabled him to pay the
two bequests promised by Lady Anne though omitted from
her will, but brightened the prospects of keeping the New-
buildings stud going for a year longer.

Although there had been no demand for Arabian horses in
England during the War, many visitors had come to see the
stud and purchases had occasionally been made by visitors
from other countries — a young Boer; the military attach^
for the Spanish Government; a South American horse dealer
who brought his whole family of thirteen to see the stud.
Buyers from the United States of America had been the most
numerous though even they were few. But the stud had
prospered. At the time of Lady Anne’s death every doubtful
horse and mare had been weeded out, it had never been so
‘splendidly perfect’. ‘I keep repeating to myself,’ said Blunt,
‘as the mares gallop and wheel in the meadows,

36a WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 19x4-1922

‘Whence are ye noble Ladies, whence are ye?

So many and so many and such glee.’

Such enjoyment was short lived. A claim was made almost
immediately to part of the Newbuildings’ stud by the grand-
children’s trustees and a long struggle, fraught with anxiety
and bitterness ensued — during which, ironically enough, he
was named President of the Arab Horse Society. The trustees’
claim was taken to court and the lawsuit became Blunt’s chief
business in life, filling his nights and days with worry. The
strain became so great that when the decision eventually went
against him he maintained in his relief that it was all for the
best. The stud had cost ,£3,000 a year, he said — of which
Lady Anne doubtless had paid some part — and he felt unable
to look after it as he used. Except for the six mares which
Blunt was permitted to keep, it went at last to Crabbet where
it is still carried on.*

In general Blunt’s feeling towards children was that ‘they
spoil conversation not only narrowing the subject, but still
more by the attention they require of their parents who have
an eye always watching them instead of thinking what they
are saying’. Of his three grandchildren, however, he was
extremely fond and had much enjoyed their frequent visits to
Newbuildings for the holidays, or the shorter visits when ‘the

* See footnote to p. 358.

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 363

children came to lunch in the cherry orchard and sang their
country songs’.

Charming as Blunt was, he could be very cold and indifferent
to anyone who seemed to him shallow or pretentious, and he
chilled many a grown person by his obvious boredom. To the
grandchildren, though not a familiar or easy companion, he
was not terrifying but delightful. When one of their three
white rabbits died he understood their grief. It reminded him
of his own youthful sorrows: ‘I never wept such floods of
tears in my life as when a mouse I had tamed died suddenly
some sixty-five years ago at Littlehampton’. He liked to take
them rabbiting or shooting or for longer jaunts to Fernycroft,
or to Worth Forest where he walked with Anne and Winnie
in the evening by the river through a glorious mass of blue-
bells and sprang a woodcock. He gave them pet animals and
birds.

For Anthony he had a special affection as his grandson
would have been, in the normal course of events, his heir. He
treated Anthony’s education more seriously than that of the
two little girls, trying to inculcate in him the sense of respon-
sibility proper to a landowner, and the precepts of an English-
man not an Imperialist. He liked Anthony to accompany him
on visits to neighbours. There is an amusing anecdote of a
call which they made together on a neighbouring lady who,
as her custom was, slapped the boy on the back and called
him ‘old chap’ : ‘it will be good for him as a first lesson in the
ways of women’, remarked Blunt, ‘me it makes shy’. On the
whole, he thought the relationship with grandchildren a
better one than with one’s own children. ‘The pleasure of life’,
he was in the habit of saying, ‘is to live with the old when you
are young and with the young when you are old’.

The separation from his grandchildren was a real depriva-
tion to him: ‘My birthday of seventy-six,’ he noted on August
1 7th, 1917, ‘which was rather sad without any of the children.’
The deaths of old friends touched him keenly, less, perhaps,
by the implied break — ‘after seventy’, he said, ‘one bears things

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

364

1914-1922

easily. I feel it myself. The dead are then, “not lost but gone
before” ’ — than by the sadness ‘of lingering on behind the
rest’. And of course the changes brought by the war fell
darkly upon him. Worst of all he was ill and in almost constant
pain. Kept awake by suffering and by the old habits of reading
at night and waking at five in the morning, he would some-
times fall asleep, just before the dinner hour. No one wished
to have him waked, knowing that the process of waking was
most painful to him. Visitors would wait through the evening
to be startled at nine-thirty or ten by groans that re-echoed
through the house. Presently the fine figure, tall, lean,
slightly bent, with long white beard and smouldering eyes,
would enter in Bedouin robes and the belated dinner would
begin.

Much of the winter time, from 1917 on, he lay upstairs in
his oak-panelled room whose windows looked out across the
weald to the Downs. Like the whole house, the room was
filled with objects, many worthless in themselves, others of
value: familiar, homely things and strange things from distant
countries, brought together in the clutter of daily life and for
their association with his past adventures. Around the fireplace
and on shelves in the corner were ranged rows of photographs
of his friends; and from the bed’s canopy a huge ostrich egg
hung above him in Mohammedan tradition to bring him good
luck. A few months before his death other beds were set up
in the living rooms of the house so that he might rest where
and when he could. Sometimes he was too ill to talk much
with his guests. ‘It was a shock’, one of them wrote in 1919,
‘to see him in bed, breathing badly and apparently very weak,
and complaining of pain and not being able to keep warm.
. . . He says he wishes for death and though he has had
such a good life, would not begin it again on any account’.
The certainty of tone, complain though he might, shows his
old spirit.

1914-19 22 the WAR AND SQUIREDOM

365

4

Blunt had been sheltered always by devotion, and in his old
age was cared for tenderly by Miss Dorothy Carleton, a cousin
of George Wyndham’s, whom he had adopted as his niece in
1906. ‘How came I,’ he wrote towards the end of the
‘Quatrains of Life’,

How came I by this jewel, this sweet friend,

This best companion of my lone life’s end?

So young she was, so fair, of soul so gay,

And I with only wisdom to commend.

She and his faithful nurse, Miss Lawrence, indeed everyone
connected with the place, did all they could to make life run
in complete accord with the Squire’s every wish. And so long
as he lived his friends stood loyally by him, writing long
letters and returning with pleasure to Newbuildings, for his
vitality, though it might sap theirs, still stimulated them to
fresh awareness of life.

Hilaire Belloc constantly dropped in full of news from
London — literary, religious, political. ‘I have lived this winter
on Belloc,’ wrote Blunt in 1914. He was particularly pleased
by Belloc’s praise of the effigy of his brother Francis, which
he had carved for the tomb of his brother and sister in the
church of the Crawley Fathers, for, though rarely spoken of,
he himself thought it perhaps his finest work in any medium.
Spurred on by Belloc’s late recognition and that of a few others,
he built a small chapel adjoining the church in order to protect
the tomb from possible harm. Unfortunately he fell too ill
after the building was begun to supervise it; the aspect of the
chapel as seen through the barred window from the church is
stark, and the light falls unsympathetically on the marble figure.

Belloc brought many visitors to Newbuildings, among them
Basil Blackwood who had already announced his intention, to
Blunt’s pleasure, of becoming the older poet’s disciple, and

366 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

Father Grogan, a Jesuit from Stonyhurst who afterwards sent
Blunt photographs of the school. ‘The remembrance of Stony-
hurst’, said Blunt, ‘always fills me with a tender feeling, happy
and good, two things which do not often go together in life,
and a wish to believe the things I believed when I was there,
and do the things I did as a boy of twelve. But my power of
believing the unbelievable is absolutely gone, far more than
that of any physical gymnastic I can imagine myself doing.’

Old friends came — Lady Helena Carnegie with her nephew,
a young poet, to call on the old poet; Lady Blanche Hozier
to stay the summer of 1916 at Carpenters, a house on the
Newbuildings estate that Blunt often lent to friends; and Mrs.
Asquith, later Lady Oxford and Asquith, at the height of her
power as the Prime Minister’s wife. It was all, he wrote
after her second visit, ‘rather like Offenbach of era boujfej
but, he added, ‘it is something to have loved and been loved
by Margot’. Desmond MacCarthy spent an occasional week-
end with him and Shane Leslie, who when he came to New-
buildings first in 1910 with his cousin Winston Churchill
had seemed to Blunt to be the young man he had always
hoped for: an Irishman, a witty speaker, a member of
the landlord class, and a convert to both Catholicism and
Nationalism — one who could do much, he thought, for
Nationalist Ireland. Wilfrid Meynell, Sydney Cockerell,
Osborne Beauclerk were frequent visitors, the latter often
bringing war news fresh from France. Letters and visits from
Theodore Rothstein and John Dillon and especially from
Winston Churchill and his wife kept his political wheels going.
Robert Cunninghame Graham, with whom he had quarrelled
about Casement, returned occasionally after the war was over
to talk of their common friend, W. H. Hudson, and the
Pampas and Morocco, and oftenest, of horses.

In a review of My Diaries in 1920 E. M. Forster, who
knows both India and Egypt well, wrote that Blunt’s ‘power
of alluring the East’ can be tested by ‘mentioning his name to
any educated Indian or Egyptian. ... In the most unexpected

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 367

places — perhaps on a roof-top among the Patna bazaars — one
may suddenly awake a eulogy upon him’. The new generation
of Indians and Egyptians no longer cared, however, when they
came to England to seek advice at Newbuildings Place.
Blunt’s news of the East was brought to him by English
travellers — by Terence Bourke with whom he had travelled
in Tunis; by ‘a very British consul’ from Damascus who
thought that Blunt’s house there had probably been con-
fiscated; by the Reuter’s agent from Persia who reported
frequent talks about Blunt with his old acquaintance Ali Koli
Khan of the Bactiari. Professor E. G. Browne of Cambridge,
who saw eye to eye with him on Eastern subjects, catalogued
his Persian and Arabic manuscripts. A few months before
Blunt’s death, Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who had just returned
from Arabia, gave him ‘the full news of what was going on in
Mesopotamia, Palestine and the rest of the Arabic-speaking
provinces of Asia’ then occupied by Great Britain. Upon each
return from the East Lawrence repaired to his ‘Master
Arabians’, Doughty and Blunt, finding the latter ‘a fire yet
flickering over the ashes of old fury’.

With Skittles Blunt had never lost touch, and now in
these later years her long illegible racy letters afforded him
much amusement. Part of a letter about the German Kaiser
written by her on November 20th, 1914, suggests their
general tone: ‘I knew the present Emperor so well when he
was Crown Prince and I have two letters he wrote me and he
also gave me his photograph and a jewelled sunshade, the
latter I have sold to get some money for the poor wounded
troops. He was most charming to me, the Emperor, when I
was a girl (N.B.’ Blunt inserted here, ‘she cannot have been less
than forty) and he went cracked over my riding. He couldn’t
ride a little bit, but he looked well on horseback, and had a
very handsome face for a German, it had not got hard at that
time. He was a short man not so tall as myself, but most charm-
ing and nice and simple at that time.’

Occasionally Skittles paid a visit to Newbuildings. In

368 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

March, 1918, Blunt wrote, ‘Thank God, here is spring at last,
a roaring lion it has come and with it XX (Skittles) ... to
spend the day and see the horses. Though deaf and partly
blind XX is unconquered in talk, and gave us all the gossip
of the hour though it is too piecemeal for reproduction. . . .

I sent her away happy with a basket of butter and eggs to eke
out her London rations. Of the stallions she prefers Rasim.’
Skittles consulted Blunt about her many difficulties during
the war and, as she grew older, about her illnesses, and Blunt
never failed in either sympathy or aid. When she died on
August 4th, 1920, he arranged, in spite of many complications,
for her burial in the churchyard of the Crawley Fathers where
her sister is also buried.

Many old ties loosened in the years preceding the war,
were renewed soon after its outbreak: letters came from Mrs.
Pollen after close on ten years’ silence; and from the Baroness
Mary Von Hugel whom Blunt had known well in the days
of his youth ; from Mabel Batten, whom he had met at Simla
in 1879 and to whom he had written a number of songs,
notably one called ‘Butterflies’ ; from Mrs. Stillman, whom he
had seen first at Kelmscott and then at Rome, and with whom
he had been ‘terribly in love’, he said, ‘thirty years ago’.

In 1914, for the first time in nine years, Mrs. Percy
Wyndham began again to visit Newbuildings — ‘a revival for
me’, wrote Blunt, ‘of days between forty and fifty years ago
when I spent so much of my youth with Madeline practising
art and poetry’. They talked together of her son George
Wyndham who was always very present to Blunt’s thoughts
and who was responsible, too, for a new friendship that Blunt
made with Lord Ribblesdale, whose daughter had married
George Wyndham’s son. ‘Talking with Ribblesdale’, Blunt
said, ‘one strikes sparks at each word and without an effort
and feels one’s best so that it is a vivid pleasure. He has
known nearly all the people I have known and has formed
the same opinion of them that I have formed, and he is a man
of the world to the exact extent that I am a man of the world,
having got all the pleasure out of it and never having been its

1914-19 22 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 369

slave, and he is a poet without having written poetry and has
dabbled in politics without being a politician. Also he is
essentially an aristocrat and as essentially a lover of his own
people, the country people among whom he lives at home in
Yorkshire as I live in Sussex.’ When he and Mark Napier
turned up at Newbuildings for shooting they had ‘a merry
dinner’ with talk of political men they had known and later,
in connection with the memoirs that Ribblesdale thought of
publishing, a discussion of how much truth could be told.
Blunt gave him copies of his own books as examples of his
views of the limits to which one should go. In general the
memoirs published during these years by Blunt’s friends and
acquaintances were too discreetly bowdlerized to meet with
his favour.

Lady Margaret Sackville was among the most faithful
visitors to Newbuildings. Blunt rightly took to himself some
little glory for her success as a poet, just as he always felt that
Lady Gregory owed much of her achievement to his influence
— a proud claim, for in 19x9 he remarked to her, ‘I know and
have often said that you have done more than any other
individual for Ireland’. She had ‘focussed’, and so greatly
increased, the value of Ireland to others, to Hyde and to
Yeats, for instance. And he noted, ‘I am more than ever
struck with Lady Gregory’s intellectual superiority to every
other woman I have ever known. It is not a man’s intellect,
it is a woman’s but she has the power of continuous original
work — and dramatic construction’: no slight praise, and its
sincerity is borne out by the trust that he put in her judgment,
especially on literary matters.

Lady Gregory was among the last visitors to Newbuildings
Place during its Squire’s lifetime. A month before his death
she wrote, ‘the house looks so fine, the old oak doors and
woodwork, the blazing oak log fires, the bunches of ever-
lasting, the (to-day) sun shining in. . . . He said good-bye
to me, “we shall never meet again”.’

AA

37 °

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 1914-1922

5

Since his early terrified struggles in Frankfort over the
prospect of future damnation, Blunt had never feared death,

that death, which seems
So hard a master when he holds his prize,

Whom no cajoleries, nor stratagems
Of beauty’s power, nor wisdom’s sophistries,

E’er turned aside from his appointed way,

But falcon-like, who with relentless foot
And pinions spread above his captured prey,

Holds his high way in heaven absolute
Nor heeds our questionings.

Rather for many years he had wished for it. More and more
he felt, as he put it in 1919, that ‘there is nothing so weari-
some as what I have become, an ancient last year’s fly which
can only buzz as it lies on its back and refuses quite to die’.
The disabilities of old age and illness irked him intolerably and
suffering made him long for freedom from pain. Nor had he
any greater wish to live his life over, than when, as a young
man, he wrote, ‘Love, life, vain strength — O who would live
again’.

But if he desired death, it was not with any hope of a future
life, nor indeed with any desire for one if his own written
statements are to be believed. Many years before, it is true,
on a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, as they sat with
others on the lawn in the afternoon, it was suggested that each
person should tell his idea of heaven: ‘Austin’s idea was to
sit ... in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant
telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and
a British victory by land’ ; ‘mine’, said Blunt, ‘was to be laid
out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to
sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird
singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, “Are

WILFRID BLUNT S GRAVE

1914-19 23 THE WAR AND SQUIREDOM 37 r

you there?” and for her to answer, “Yes, are you?” and so
turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand
years’. But at the last it was for deep and dreamless sleep with
never any waking that he longed.

When the shadows come, when the crowd is leaving the
mart,

Then shalt thou learn that thou needest sleep, Death’s
kindly arms for thy heart.

In a letter to Lady Anne written in August, 1917, in answer
to one from her explaining her long-ago conversion to Roman
Catholicism, he told her of his re-examination during the
previous year of the questions he had argued forty or more
years ago with Dr. Meynell, ‘especially’, he wrote, ‘as to the
probability of a future life, my chief difficulty, and the grounds
on which the church originally rested its beliefs in a resur-
rection’. He quoted from the Book of Job: There is hope of a
tree , if it be cut down , that it will sprout again , and that the tender
branch thereof will not cease. . . . yet through the scent of water
it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant. But man dieth
and wasteth away: Tea , man giveth up the ghost , and where is
he? As the waters fail from the sea , and the flood decayeth and
drieth up: So man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be
no more, they shall not awake , nor be raised out of their sleep.
‘This’, he said, ‘is exactly what I feel to be the only reality, as
it was to Job.’

His lack of belief in a future life was common knowledge
to his friends for he discussed the matter freely both with
those who agreed with his views and those, like Lady Gregory,
who did not. ‘Well, I believe we shall meet again after death,’
she once remarked, ‘and I will say “I told you so”; but if we
don’t you will have the worst of it, for you can’t say anything
to me.’

Yet certain of his friends hold that at the last moment he
regained a faith he had never really lost, in the Roman Catholic
Church and its doctrines. 7 It is a fact that Blunt received

372 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT 19x4-1922

extreme unction before his death on September 12th, 1922,
though whether because of belief in its efficacy or owing to
friendly pressure may be questioned. His will, whose last
codicil is dated less than a month before his death, provided
for his burial in unconsecrated ground without church rites.
The directions are explicit and in character with his lifelong
independence. He requested that he be laid in the ground
in the simplest manner ‘wrapped in my old Eastern travelling
carpet and without coffin or casket of any kind in a spot in
Newbuildings wood known to my executors without religious
ceremony or the intervention of strangers but by men employed
on my Newbuildings Estate’.

The spot chosen by him is in the tall grass of a long tree-
lined ride a short distance from the Newbuildings garden.
There, on September 15th,. 1922, he was buried in the
presence of a few intimate friends one of whom had wrapped
him as he had wished in his travelling carpet. Over the grave
later was placed a monument, similar to the one that he had
designed for Lady Anne’s grave, of grey Sussex stone, per-
fectly proportioned, and unadorned except for his armorial
bearings, his name and dates, and a few lines of his own :

Dear checker-work of woods, the Sussex Weald !

If a name thrills me yet of things of earth,

That name is thine. How often I have fled
To thy deep hedgerows and embraced each field,

Each lag, each pasture, — fields which gave me birth
And saw my youth, and which must hold me dead.

Lichens have overgrown the stone; rabbits dart and play
about it; birds sing in the near-by trees; time has brought
Blunt’s grave into harmony with the Sussex Weald.

NOTES

Citations in the text of this book are made from Blunt’s published
writings, books by other authors marked by an asterisk in the bibliography,
and unpublished private papers.

Blunt’s spelling of transliterated Arabic words has been used throughout
this book.

CHAPTER I

1 . Something of the pride and beauty of their descendant Wilfrid Scawen page 15

Blunt is to be seen in the portraits of Samuel Blunt of Horsham
and Winifred, his wife, in a painting by John Zoffany, R.A.,
reproduced in colour in English Conversation Pieces of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries , by Dr. G. C. Williamson
(Plate xxxvi).

2. Mary and George Wyndham left two surviving sons: Henry, who page 1%

succeeded to the title in 1869; and Percy Scawen, who in i860
married Madeline, daughter of Sir Guy and Lady Campbell.

The Hon. Percy Wyndham and Madeline Wyndham had five
children: Mary, married Lord Elcho, later Earl of Wemyss,

1883; George, 1863-1913; Guy, 1865- ; Madeline,

married Charles Adeane, Esq., of Babraham, Cambridge; and
Pamela, married first the Hon. Edward Tennant, later Lord
Glenconner, and second Lord Grey of Fallodon.

It is to Percy Wyndham’s wife, Madeline, and not to his
daughter, to whom Blunt most often refers in his writings.

She was the granddaughter of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and
Pamela, the reputed daughter of Philippe d’Orleans and Madame
de Genlis.

Percy Wyndham’s son George was the great friend of Blunt’s
later years. In 1887 he married Lady Sibell Lumley, daughter
of the ninth Earl of Scarborough, married first Earl Grosvenor
by whom she had three children: Cuckoo, later Countess of
Shaftesbury; Lettice, later Countess Beauchamp; and Bendor,

Lord Belgrave, later Duke of Westminster. George Wyndham
and Lady Grosvenor had one son, Percy, bom in 1887, married
Diana Lister, daughter of Lord Ribblesdale, killed in action
in 1914.

373

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

374

page 2.2 3 .

page 21 4.
page 2$ 5 .

page 2 6 6 .

page 27 7 .
page 28 8 .

In later years Roman Catholic ritual did not appeal to Blunt. ‘Little
as I am a Protestant,’ he wrote in 1914, ‘I have a great aesthetic
dislike for the Catholic ceremonial, the baptism, marriage and
burial rites with the complexities of incense, holy water and the
rest, while the Church of England ceremonial is really dignified
in all three. The Dies Irae chant is fine and nothing else in the
Catholic ritual.”

Stonyhurst is known as Crowhurst in Proteus and Amadeus.

Julia Margaret Cameron, daughter of Mr. Pattle of strange fame;
friend of Tennyson and Watts; great-aunt of Mrs. Virginia
Woolf; and one of the first and most unrelenting of photographers.
Cf. — Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair W omen , by
Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1926.

Henry Currie was the father of four sons who enter Blunt’s history
at various points: Bertram, banker and strong political supporter
of Gladstone; Philip, later Lord Currie, Private Secretary to
Lord Salisbury, Head of the Foreign Office, and Ambassador;
Francis Gore, Blunt’s especial friend among the Curries and
known to him as ‘Bitters’; and George. Sir Philip Currie
married Blunt’s friend, Mary Montgomery i.e., ‘Violet Fane’,
first married to Henry Sydenham Singleton.

Dr. Meynell’s portrait by Moloney hangs now at Newbuildings Place.

Proteus and Amadeus is the only published document that shows con-
secutively and directly Blunt’s inner life. The letters convey
something of the writers’ charm, and their candour and spon-
taneity appeals to the reader’s sympathy, however old-fashioned
the point of view may now seem.

Neither correspondent wished to have his own letters published.
Blunt felt that Dr. Meynell’s letters, which had ‘helped’ him great-
ly, should be made available to the public. Dr. Meynell agreed to
the publication of his letters only on condition that Blunt should
at the same time publish his. They were published anonymously
and fictitious names were adopted for real persons and places. Not
till Blunt was an old man did he publicly acknowledge the author-
ship. Cardinal Newman, he wrote in My Diaries , ‘had almost
consented himself to do the editing, for Dr. Meynell, the Amadeus
of the letters, was much at Edgbaston j ust then. But for one reason
or another the old man changed his mind, and de Vere [Aubrey
de Vere] undertook the thing for him and wrote the preface’.

NOTES

375

In connection with Proteus arid Amadeus Blunt stayed with
Newman in 1876 or 1877 at Edgbaston on the way home from
a visit to Ireland. He arrived at the Oratory with a raging tooth-
ache which disappeared at once when he touched Newman’s
hand. At the time Blunt was cautioned not to speak of this
‘miracle’ but he wrote of it years later in My Diaries .

CHAPTER 11

1. In Proteus and Amadeus Blunt says that his belief and practice of page

religion underwent no particular change during the two years
after he went into the world at the age of sixteen (i.e. 1856-8)
and implies that his first diplomatic post was at Constantinople.
Probably these and other inaccuracies, such as the length of his
stay at two schools and the failure to mention a third, are inten-
tional in order to mislead the reader as to the identity of the
author.

2. Mother of Bertrand Russell, the mathematician, now Earl Russell, page 36

3. Before returning to Germany he paid a month’s visit to cousins in page 27

Ireland (1861-2).

4. In later life Skittles was known as Mrs. Bailey. Her gravestone in page qz

the churchyard of the Franciscan monastery at Crawley is
lettered C.W.B.

5. Ferdinand of Coburg-Kohary, King of Portugal, and his mistress, page 47

Elise Hensler, daughter of a Boston tailor who captivated Ferdi-
nand while singing in Un Ballo Maschera . He installed her in
his palace at Cintra in 1855 and married her in 1869 when Duke
Ernest II of Coburg made her Countess Edla in the peerage of
Saxe-Coburg Gotha.

6 . During his convalescence in the autumn of 1866 Blunt journeyed page 48

through Switzerland to Florence and Rome.

7. Blunt, always interested in horses, had learned in Spain ‘to appreciate^* 52

the desert type of horseflesh as it existed still pure in Andalusia’.
During the months in South America he found that English
thoroughbred sires had not yet been introduced into the River
Plate district; the only breed on the Pampas when Blunt was
there was the Andalusian breed brought by the early Spanish
settlers. It was an excellent and hardy breed. Blunt found, with
certain defects of shape attributable more to its Barb ancestry
than to the true Arabian.

376

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

CHAPTER III

page 53 i. The marriage took place on June 8th, 1869. Eight days later Blunt’s
sister Alice married and shortly after came the first marriage of
Lady Anne’s brother.

page 53 2. Lady Anne, born in 1837, was three years older than Blunt.

page 53 3. Of her brother Blunt wrote at the time of his death in August 1906,
that he was ‘original almost to the point of genius, but without
the smallest sense of proportion’. Lady Anne was devoted to him.
Though Blunt saw little of him in later years when Lord Love-
lace was ‘too wrapped up in his family history to work seriously
at anything else’, Lovelace generally sided with him in politics.

page 53 4. Cf. Sonnet VIII in Love Sonnets of Proteus. Many lines of Blunt’s
poetry might well be applied to her even if not written specific-
ally to or for her — such as,

the wild-birds’ music of her voice which we shall hear in dreams

till we too sleep,

from Sonnets and Songs by Proteus.

page 58 5. Alice Blunt died August 1 ith, 1872. Francis Blunt died April 21st,
1872.

P a g e 59 6. On the pedestal is a tablet commemorating his sister.

page 60 7. Crabbet is referred to inaccurately in Augustus Hare’s Sussex as ‘a
modern Georgian house, built from the admirable design of its mis-
tress, Lady Anne Blunt, the African traveller and granddaughter
of the poet Byron. The place has become celebrated,’ Hare
continues, ‘for its breed of Arab horses and their sales. The
owner of the house, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, has insisted on a wild
piece of land, covered with rubbish heaps and brushwood — “the
African desert” — being left in front of the house door, in curious
contrast to the well-kept lawns and pleached alleys a little farther
off.’

page 62 8. The Blunts had brought home from Asia Minor a little grey stallion
of a superior type — doubtless an Arab — very pretty and of great
courage and endurance. With him they made their first practical
experiment in pony breeding at Crabbet. The stallion was mated
with half-a-dozen pony mares bought the following summer at
Barnet Fair. It was a haphazard experiment, leading to no result
of any importance but suggesting to them the idea of a more
serious breeding venture. From Algeria they brought back two

NOTES

377

Barbs with the idea of breeding from them. But this experiment
was never carried out. Not until their journey to the Bedouin
tribes of the Euphrates did they embark seriously upon the
building up of a stud.

CHAPTER IV

i. James Henry Skene tabulated the intricate rules for breeding horses /agv? 72
which the tribes preserved scrupulously along with their horses’
pedigrees. No traveller before him, not even Burckhardt, had
done this accurately. In Europe knowledge of the Arab breeds
was practically lacking. Oddly, the only serious error made by
Blunt in the appendices to Lady Anne’s Bedouin Tribes of the
Euphrates was based on Skene’s authority. He said that the
Darley Arabian was of a strain of Kehailan blood called Ras-el~
Fedaur instead of Managhi as he learned later was correct.

With Skene’s help the Blunts bought at Aleppo a two-year-old
filly ‘Dajanieh’ that stood in their stud books afterwards as the
original of a numerous and perfect progeny through her daughter
‘Nefrissa’ whose astonishing fertility produced while at Crabbet 21
living colts and fillies, the last foaled when she was 27. And they
bought ‘Sherifa,’ a white Hamdaniyeh Simri, that had been bred
in Nejd and given by Ibn Saoud five years before Blunt bought
her to the Turkish governor of Mecca, who presented her to the
Chief Ulema at Aleppo. He used her only as a brood mare and
to carry him once a day to and from the mosque on a saddle of
blue and gold. They also purchased their first stallion ‘Kars’ and
the two mares ‘Hagar’ and ‘Jerboa’ that they rode on the journey.

Hagar had been bred by the Gomussa, the most notable of horse-
breeding tribes. At Deyr they made several more purchases: a
chestnut mare, a Saadeh Togan; a three-year old bay filly, a
Managieh Slaji; and a pony mare, also Managieh.

chapter v

1. To the second of Lady Anne’s two volumes Blunt added an appendix page 92
containing the precise information that they had gathered con-
cerning the physical geography of northern Arabia, the history
of the rise and fall of Wahhabism in Arabia, and ‘the Euphrates
Valley Railway and its kindred scheme of railway communica-
tion between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf’.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

378

page 98 2. Hogarth says in The Penetration of Arabia that the people of Hail
‘had lately seen Doughty as well as Huber, and it is an open
question if they had not by this time learned the true character
of both Palgrave and Guarmani’. But it is more than doubtful if
the Blunts knew at this time of Doughty’s or Huber’s journeys.
In speaking of Theodore Bent’s wife, Hogarth says that she was
the only European woman beside Lady Anne to penetrate to the
interior of Arabia. The Bents made their joint journey in 1897.
page 99 3. Lady Anne inserted in her pilgrimage history an invaluable account
of the horses of the Emir, including much information about
Arab horses in general.

page 100 4. The history of Wahhabism is a militant one, although when the
Blunts went to Nejd the Wahhabi Empire was shrunk and broken
by outward pressure and inward dissension. In 1878 the ruler
of Nejd, Mohammed Ibn Rashid, was at least in name and out-
ward practise a Wahhabi and Hail was a stronghold of Wahhab-
ism. The followers of Mohammed Ibn Abd-el-Wahhab (said
to have been born in 1691 or 1703 and to have died in 1791)
were reported fanatical in their devotion to his teaching and in
their hatred of all those who professed other views. It was small
wonder that the Blunts were apprehensive.
page 107 5. They corrected previous maps of the country along the pilgrim route
as well as of Northern Arabia from Jof to Hail.
page 109 6. They brought back also information on rock formations and new
altitude measurements of the plateau of Hail and Jebel Shammar.
page 109 7. Wallin reached Hail on September 20th, 1845, and again in 1848 but
the two brief accounts of his journeys which he submitted to the
Royal Geographical Society were hardly known to English readers
other than geographers. Palgrave arrived at Hail in July 1862;
Guarmani in 1864, and both Huber and Doughty in 1878, a
few months before the Blunts. Huber and Euting together did
not reach Hail until 1883. Doughty was the first to appear at
Hail undisguised and openly professing Christianity and was
exceedingly unpopular among the townspeople. On his first visit
he was protected by Ibn Rashid but on his second visit the Emir
was away, and he had to be smuggled out of the town. Blunt like
Doughty had been one of the few people to believe in Palgrave’s
accounts, though he recognized their exaggeration and frequent
inaccuracy and found his account of Arabian horses absurd.

NOTES

379

CHAPTER VI

1. Blunt was of the opinion that India stood in no need, politically or page n 6

strategically, of such a line as the proposed Euphrates railway
and that as a commercial speculation the scheme was a delusion.

His paper is interesting particularly because no one else seems to
have considered whether or no the proposed railway line could
pay its way.

2. Sir Edward Hamilton, usually spoken of in Blunt’s writings as Eddy page 117

Hamilton, was Gladstone’s private secretary from 1880-5 anc ^
later the Permanent Official Head of the Treasury.

3. This idea must be considered less ‘wild’ if the similarity of Wahhab- page izz

ism and the teaching of Jemal-ed-Din is noted.

4. This journey over Jebel Hellal ‘completed the circle of Blunt’s politi- page 131

cal relations with the northern tribes begun in 1878, and . . .
left him on terms of friendship with every sheykh of importance
from the Nile to the Tigris’.

5. When the Blunts met the Anazeh ten days ride from Damascus, they page 132

obtained the celebrated Rodanieh mare of which they had heard
constant praises. Blunt paid fioo for her and she stood in their
stud book as ‘Rodania’, producing for the Crabbetstud quite half
its finest stock. He purchased also Meshura, a Seglawieh of the
highest reputation who proved at Crabbet worthy of her fame,
and Dahma, whose offspring made a name for themselves prin-
cipally in Australia.

6. The chapters of The Future of Islam came out first in monthly num- page 132

bers of the Fortnightly Review and had considerable effect in Eng-
land. Later they appeared in book form among the English
reading moslems of India and in translation amongst the Egyptians.

Blunt wrote in an article for the Nineteenth Century , September
1882, ‘it must be remembered that nothing at that time had
appeared in print hinting so much as the possibility of new life
and thought in Islam’. The book had considerable influence.

The last chapter, as Blunt wrote to a friend in 1914, was
‘curiously prophetic’. Jehu Junior wrote in Vanity Fair , January
31st, 1885, ‘his book, The Future of Islam^ contained a remarkable
forecast, among other things of the Arab movement of 1882 and
the career of the Mahdi\ Lord Lytton praised it highly for
‘the stores of instruction and suggestion’ which he found in it.

380

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

CHAPTER VII

page * 35 I. Descendants of natives of Circassia who became masters of Egypt
under the name of the Mameluke Beys. Early in the nineteenth
century Mohammed Ali with the help of his Albanian troops
treacherously murdered 500 of the Mamelukes, and replaced
their rule with a new administration. Gradually he replaced his
Albanians in command of the army by Turks or Circassians again,
and employed them also for all authoritative executive posts in
the civil service. His immediate successors followed him in this
and the Turco- Circassian or Circassian element again became
the ruling class.

page 139 2. As Scott, The Times regular correspondent in Egypt, depended upon
Colvin for most of his news, the ordinary Times articles were not
fully informed. Thomas Chenery himself was a good Arabic
scholar — he had been Times correspondent at Constantinople
1854-6; professor of Arabic at Oxford 1868-77; one of the
revisers of the Old Testament; and the author of ‘a most admirable
translation of the “Assemblies of Hariri” ’. He was deeply
interested in all that went on in Arabic speaking countries, and
was influenced by the fact that he himself was an Egyptian
bondholder. He gave every prominence to Blunt’s and Gregory’s
letters during the next months and even when war came, con-
tinued to give the Nationalists a fair showing.

page 139 3. The Khedive had promised on September 9th that the army should
be increased to full legal strength. Sir Auckland Colvin thought
‘the sum proposed would suffice for an increase up to 15,000
men. I am quite certain,” wrote Blunt, in the Nineteenth
Century , September 1882, ‘that he told me this; and it is a point
worth noticing, as it accounts in part at least for the promotion
of officers so loudly complained of afterwards by the Controllers.
It is obvious that every increase in the army would necessitate
a corresponding increase and promotion of officers.’

page 140 4* In his diary for December 1881 Sir Charles Dilke noted ‘Malet
wrote from Cairo to Paris, telling me that he still had confidence
in the moderation of the progressist party represented by Arabi
and the Colonels, and that he was managing them through
Wilfrid Blunt, who was acting as a go-between; but a little later
on the relations between Blunt and Malet became such as to
show that each had thought he was using the other as a tool.’

NOTES

38i

5. Because it resulted in advantage to England the Joint Note was page 140

generally supposed in Egypt to have been conceived and planned
at the British Foreign Office, whereas in reality it had been
drafted at the Quai d’Orsay ‘in the interests, so far as they were
political — for they were also financial — of French ambition’.

Lord Granville had delayed five days before signing the Note —
a delay that Blunt attributed to the effect of his own Manifesto —
and had added a characteristic postscript: ‘Her Majesty’s Govern-
ment must not be considered as committing themselves thereby
to any particular mode of action.’ Malet and Colvin both con-
demned the Note. Malet telegraphed repeatedly for permission
to add to it a written explanation such as he had asked Blunt to
give Arabi, and wrote strongly condemning the note as dangerous
and impolitic. ‘There is not a word of this in the published
papers, yet the documents must certainly exist.’

6. Blunt showed the draft of the letter to Gladstone’s two private/^ 147

secretaries, Hamilton and Godley, to see if they could suggest
improvement. The tone was moderate and fair and both secre-
taries approved it, especially Godley, Hamilton’s senior, who
made Blunt strike out a phrase of apology for interfering in this
important public matter, ‘saying emphatically, “your interference
needs no excuse”.’ Both he and Hamilton urged that the letter
be sent at once.

7. It is curious to note that Morley who in 1879 opposed the intervention page 1 50

of England and France in Egyptian affairs and after the battle
of Tel-el-Kebir deprecated annexation, from 1880 to September
1882 was a Jingo of Jingoes in regard to English intervention
in Egypt. His chapter on Egypt in his Life of Gladstone is remark-
able for the fact that he so presents his material as to imply not
what was actually the fact but what a follower of Gladstone
would like in later years to believe to have been true. This
misrepresentation may perhaps be excused by the extremely
summary nature of his dealings in this book with Egypt neces-
sitated by lack of space. An example of his treatment of the
subject occurs for instance, when he speaks of the result of
the Joint Note of January 6th, 1881, in ousting France and
installing England in control of Egypt: ‘So extraordinary a result
shows how impenetrable were the windings of the labyrinth.

The foremost statesmen of England and France were in their

382

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

conning towers, and England at any rate employed some of the
ablest of her agents.’ He omits to note that the statesmen in
England paid not the slightest attention to the advice of their
agents at Cairo.

page 152 8 . The first telegram, to Arabi, ran \ . . Lord Granville states in Parlia-
ment that Sultan Pasha and the Deputies have joined the Khedive
against you. If untrue, let Sultan Pasha telegraph me contradic-
tion. United you have nothing to fear. Could you not form a
ministry with Sultan Pasha as Prime Minister? But stand firm.’
The next, to Sultan Pasha, \ . . I trust that all who love Egypt
will stand together. Do not quarrel with Arabi. The danger is
too great.’ These two were intended to supplement each other
and designed to bring Arabi and Sultan to terms together. Finally
Blunt sent off telegrams, all alike, to six deputies: ‘Parti National,
est-il actuellement content d’Arabi. Le gouvernement Anglais
pretend le contraire. Si vous laissez desunir de l’armee, 1 ’Europe
vous annexera.

page 1 55 9. The telegram from Malet ran: ‘the Khedive sent for M. Sienkiewicz
and me this morning and informed us that it had come to his
knowledge that the military intended this afternoon to depose
him and proclaim Halim Pasha as Khedive of Egypt. . . . The
Khedive said he hardly believed the truth of this information.’

CHAPTER VIII

page 1 56 i. By March 1909 Harrison and Blunt had diverged from what had for
27 years been a common political sympathy about Foreign Affairs
into antagonism, Harrison’s path being towards war with Germany,
Blunt’s towards a gradual shedding of our ‘white man’s burden’
in Egypt and India.

page 158 2. After the Egyptian uprising Blunt held no communication with
Malet until August 1897 when he received a cordial letter from
Malet expressing regret for their troubled relations in the past and
enclosing a number of manuscript poems which Malet had found
among his mother’s papers attributed to Blunt. They turned out
to have been written by Schomberg Kerr in 1861 and 1864
when both he and Blunt were much with Lady Malet. Blunt
returned them to Malet with a letter which he hoped would bring
about a renewal of friendly relations.

NOTES

383

3. The conference of great European Powers—' Turkey ironically excepted page 158

— was the European Congress which met at Constantinople on
June 23rd, 1882, to discuss means of preserving in Egypt the rights
of the Sultan, the Khedive, Europe and the Egyptian people.

4. People — or the newspapers — in England were very angry, charging page 159

Arabi with having retired under a flag of truce. This charge of
violation of the white flag was later brought against Arabi at his
trial and ‘absurdly insisted upon’ by Gladstone who committed
himself to the statement that to retire under the white flag was
a violation of the laws of war although Admiral Seymour had
said at the time that he would understand the white flag to mean
evacuation of the forts. The charge was persisted in till it was
discovered in Lord Wolseley’s Soldier's Pocket Book , a text book
of the British army, that the contrary was the rule.

5. Mr. Guedalla notes that by ‘Cattawayo’ the Queen meant ‘Cetewayo page 166

of Zululand’ who had recently been much feted in England.

6. The charges against Arabi were to be based on the abuse of the white page 168

flag, complicity in the massacres and pillage of June 1 ith, com-
plicity in the destruction by fire of Alexandria, and general acts
of mutiny and rebellion against the Khedive and the Sultan.

7. Blunt continued to be Arabi’s friend — not only visiting him at page 169

Ceylon but entertaining him many times at Sheykh Obeyd on his
release and return to Egypt as a broken and prematurely old man,
urging the Egyptian Government and above all the Nationalists
to pay him tribute at the time of his death, and defending him
against defamatory articles after his death. See especially Blunt’s
articles in the Nineteenth Century , September 1892, and Egypiy
October 19 11.

8 . Broadley was charged with retaining a letter from Arabi, with receiv- page 170

ing a salary of j£ioo a month from the ex-Khedive Ismail and
with various other far from straight procedures in his relations
with Blunt and the Nationalist sympathizers during Arabi’s trial.

Beaman had written several letters to Blunt in which he had
said that he knew enough of the facts concerning the Khedive’s
complicity in the Alexandrian riots to convict Tewfik. He had
been keenly against the Palace party and sympathetic with Blunt.
Suddenly on August nth a letter was published in The Times
disclaiming for Beaman any disapproval of Tewfik. This letter
was authorized by Beaman.

384 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

page 175 9. It is noteworthy in view of Blunt’s later Irish adventures to find in
Mrs. Dugdale’s Life of Lord Balfour , Vol. 1, page 173, a
private letter from Balfour written in 1889, during his struggle
as Chief Secretary to Ireland with the Plan of Campaign, urging
the purchase of the Ponsonby estate by a syndicate, followed by
Mrs. Dugdale’s statement that c the sequel to this is in the report
of Parliamentary Questions of March 12th, 14th, i8th, when
Balfour blandly denied all “official knowledge” of the purchase
of the Ponsonby estate by a syndicate.’ It illustrates the division
between public and private life and morality which is so con-
venient to the official, so bewildering to the layman, and which
Blunt tried to combat.

page 175 10. There were many objections to The Secret History of the English
Occupation of Egypt at the time of its publication — most of them
made less on the charge of its being an untrue or distorted picture
than of its being an unwarranted exposure. ‘Button’ threatened
proceedings, though he later excused himself. F rederic Harrison
complained on the part of Malet, Colvin and Hamilton, though
they themselves made no complaint. On the other hand Blunt
also received many commendatory letters confirming his account
— one, for instance from Lord Eversley who had been a member
of the Government in 1882. Egypt and its Betrayal , a book
written by Farman, Consul General for the United States of
America in Egypt in Ismail’s time and until after the bombard-
ment of Alexandria, corroborates Blunt’s account.

Such allusions as the following from Lord Zetland’s biography
of Lord Cromer are still met with, though with decreasing
frequency: ‘But if Baring showed impatience at the sentimentality
of visionaries like Blunt and at the crochets of philanthropists
whose emotions outran their reason. . . .’ On the other hand
Blunt is referred to in Lord Carnock by Harold Nicolson as
‘that splendid eccentric’ although Mr. Nicolson does not uphold
Blunt’s politics. Mr. Nicolson also writes that Lord Carnock
‘never contended . . . that our attitude in the Egyptian question
was throughout wholly defensible. When nearly thirty years later
a Foreign Office official was declaiming in righteous indignation
against Italy’s sudden descent on Tripoli, he was startled to find him-
self checked by a flash of sudden wrath in the blue eyes of his chief.
“It is not for us,” said Arthur Nicolson, “to cast that sort of stone”.’

NOTES

CHAPTER IX

1. ‘Some years afterwards,’ Blunt wrote in Gordon at Khartoum , ‘he page 178

came round to my views and tried to get up a native Egyptian
ministry favourable to England out of the debris of the Nationalist
Party, going even to the length of consulting me about those
capable of composing it; but it was then too late, and English
policy in Egypt has floundered ever since in a Serbonian bog of
irreconcilable native hostility. He would have done better to have
taken my advice in 1885.’

2. This statement was the memorandum which Arabi made for 'Lord page 180

Dufferin and had already given to Blunt, with such changes as the
passing of a year made necessary. Tt reiterates,’ wrote Blunt in
Gordon at Khartoum , ‘the truth which underlay the whole
Egyptian position, namely, that the supposed necessity of main-
taining Tewfik on the Khedivial throne at Cairo must, if per-
sisted in, vitiate any attempt to restore self-government to the
Egyptians, or to free England from the prolonged responsibility
of protecting him with an occupying force. It suggests in what
way constitutional government could be restored, and enumerates
a variety of reforms, most of which have been subsequently made
part of English policy. About the Soudan, too, the affairs of which
were to become a main subject of interest for those responsible
for Egypt’s welfare, it contains a remarkable paragraph.’

3. Anglo-Indian now officially means Eurasian; but it is used by Blunt page 18a

to mean the English living in India.

4. In India (‘Modern World Series’) Sir Valentine Chirol speaks of the page 185

Indian National Congress meeting for the first time in Bombay
in the last days of 1885. No mention is made of the earlier con-

n / ference of which that later was a continuation.

5. Seymour Keay was a banker living at Hyderabad who had helped the page 1 86

Nizam’s late minister, Salar Jung, ‘to draft his political claims on
the British Government, especially in respect to the Berar Pro-
vinces’. ‘His connection with Salar Jung,’ wrote Blunt in The
Secret History . . . Part II, India , ‘had made him acquainted
with all the ins and outs of the scandalous persecution to which
that great native statesman had been subjected by the Indian
Government, nor did he scruple to make use of his knowledge as
occasion served in native interests. This made him a thorn in the
side of the Calcutta Foreign Office. In 1885, having made a

386

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

considerable fortune, he returned to England, and was elected
to Parliament by a Scotch borough as an extreme radical.’ Blunt
had made his acquaintance in England in connection with a
pamphlet Keay published in 1882 called Spoiling the Egyptians ,
a Tale of Shame , an effective exposition of the financial intrigues
leading to England’s bombardment of Alexandria.

page 1S6 6. He arranged for the sending of four Arab horses from India to take part
in the forthcoming Arab race at Newmarket. In the horses of
the Nizam of Hyderabad and of his new minister young Salar
Jung he was especially interested.

page 1S7 7. Lord Ripon’s viceroyalty at first encouraged the natives, Blunt
believed, because he inspired their confidence by his moral
integrity, simplicity and paternal manner; understood the part
played by religion in Indian politics — possibly Blunt thought
with natural prejudice in favour of his own Church, because he
was a Roman Catholic of extraordinary piety; and followed in his
first public acts the liberal principles announced by Gladstone.
Later for a time Blunt felt that he became corrupted by ‘ associa-
tion with his Whig friends in Office’.

page 192 8. When Blunt returned to England he met Gordon’s friend Brockle-
hurst who told him that ‘Gordon had asked repeatedly for him
when he was starting for Egypt’. ‘It is a thousand pities,’ Blunt
observed, ‘that I did not see him (being away in India), as I could
have prevented his making the mistake of going to Tewfik and
neglecting to go to Mahdi.’ Lady Gregory wrote to Blunt in
May, 1885, ‘I have been reading only now Gordon’s Journals,
and think you ought to feel very proud and very glad that your
name seemed so sometimes to stand between him and injustice —
“I shall have Wilfrid Blunt making a nice row about this”.’

page 192 9. On September 8th, 1882, Blunt had received from Eddy Hamilton a
letter in which the following sentence occurred: ‘Some months
ago (this, please, is quite private) certain enquiries were made
about Ireland, and the result of these enquiries was, to the best
of my recollection, that he, Gordon, was not clothed in the
rightest of minds.’ This observation had been drawn from
Hamilton by Blunt’s forwarding to Gladstone through him a
letter from Gordon about ‘the mess’ Malet and Colvin had made
at Cairo — a letter which confirmed the Government in their
judgment of Gordon’s state of mind.

NOTES

387

10. In Gordon and the Sudan by Bernard M. Allen. page 194

11. In dealing with Egyptian affairs in general Lord Cromer’s prejudice page 195

is evident. He speaks for instance of ‘some illiterate Egyptian, of
the type of Arabi or Mahmoud Sami’. Neither of these leaders
was illiterate, in fact Sami was exceptionally learned and intel-
lectual. In dealing with Blunt, Lord Cromer’s prejudice is not
unnaturally equally prejudiced. In the only passage concern-
ing Blunt allowed the dignity of inclusion in the text of Modern
Egypt , he says: ‘At one period of the proceedings, his services
were utilized as an intermediary between Sir Edward Malet
and the nationalists. The selection was unfortunate, for it is
abundantly clear from the account which Mr. Blunt has given
of his own proceedings (Blunt’s Secret History of the British
Occupation of Egypt) that, with the exception of some knowledge
of the Arabic language, he possessed none of the qualifications
necessary to ensure success in the execution of so difficult and
delicate a mission. He advised the nationalists to hold to the army
or they would be “annexed to Europe”. The advice was, without
doubt, well-meant, but it was certainly inopportune and mischiev-
ous. Whatever danger of “annexation to Europe” existed lay
rather in the direction of the consolidation of the national and
military parties than in that of their separation. A trained
politician would have seen this.’ Lord Cromer omits to mention
that Blunt was successful as intermediary in every case except
that concerning the Budget, wherein any intermediary must have
failed; he also fails to state that the telegram which he quotes
was sent by Blunt to certain of the Deputies on May 15th, some
months after he had ceased to be employed as intermediary and
after circumstances had so changed as to make it evident that
the nationalists could hope for little if the army’s support were
withdrawn from them.

12. While he was still in India an official letter had come from Baring page 195

delivering a message from Sheri f Pasha that he would not be
permitted to land in Egypt. Though the order worked little
hardship on Blunt at the moment, he saw in it ‘a fine opening
for exposing if I choose, Mr. Gladstone’s hot and cold-blowing
about Arabi’s restoration’. On Button’s advice, Blunt’s first
move on returning to London was to obtain a legal opinion upon
the case. Finding that he had no legal grounds upon which to

388

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

page 195

page 197

page 19S

page 199

page 200

combat exile, he determined to take up the matter diplomatically
and, despite the assurances of various friends that the Foreign
Office had nothing to do with the case, he sent in a statement
to Lord Granville. On August 4th the case came up in the
House of Commons. In the morning a Blue Book on the subject
had been published. In the debate the Government had little
defence to put up. 4 On the whole,’ Blunt wrote, 4 1 think it has
strengthened my position, not only with the public but with the
Government. The House was decidedly favourable to me in the
debate.’ During the debate Blunt’s purpose of exposing Glad-
stone’s varying attitudes toward Egypt and the Government’s
personal animus against himself had been achieved. As nothing
more could be gained Blunt dropped the matter until the follow-
ing year when the Conservatives came into office with Lord
Salisbury as Prime Minister.

13. Blunt’s high opinion of the Mahdi’s wisdom, honour and power

was never extended to the Mahdi’s successor, the Khalifa Abdul-
lah, who seemed to Blunt less wise both morally and practically
and to be less easy to treat with.

14. 'We’ refers to Blunt and George Howard. The photograph of the

Sheykh taken on this occasion is the frontispiece of ‘The Secret
History Series,’ Vol. 1.

15. He was asked among other things to procure for the son of one of his

friends a talisman from Jemal-ed-Din as protection in case the
son was captured by the Mahdi. This Blunt did on condition that
the talisman should not be used for any ruse de guerre.

16. Khartoum fell on January 26th, 1885; news of the disaster reached

London on February 5th; and news of Gordon’s death came on
February 10th.

17. The report was incorrect. In the words of an officer of the British

Army of Occupation it was 4 a stiff fight and honours were
equal’.

CHAPTER X

page 208 i . Blunt’s adherence to Lord Randolph caused much perturbation among
his friends and was particularly opposed by Mrs. Howard. Her
husband, however, rejoiced: 4 He says,’ reported Blunt, ‘that I
will ruin the Tory party.’ Percy Wyndham was more encourag-
ing. He had a high opinion of Lord Randolph. ‘You two,’ he

NOTES 3 8 9

said, ‘if you stick to your principle of telling the truth at all costs
may yet save England.’

2 . Middleton thought that he had obtained the constituency of South- page 208
wark for Blunt. But Button, upon whom Blunt still depended for
aid and advice, played him false, managing to have his own
brother, Lord Mayo, asked to a meeting of the Southwark elec-
tors and selected as their candidate, frightening them away from
Blunt by saying that he was an out and out home-ruler whereas
Lord Mayo was an Orange Landlord. Middleton then found
Blunt another constituency.

CHAPTER XI

1. The wisdom of Blunt’s case was shown in October 1887 when the page 226
following letter appeared in the Birmingham Daily Post signed
‘Justice’: ‘Seeing a paragraph in your paper lately respecting the
arrest of Mr. Blunt in Ireland, and also of Lady Anne Blunt
being roughly used, I am at a loss to understand why they
should go to Ireland to speak against evictions when a poor
woman, with either 6 or 8 children, was turned out of her home
by Lady Anne Blunt’s agent on her estate, not a dozen miles
from Birmingham and at the time they were quite destitute of
any means or home. The above event occurred only about a fort-
night ago.’ The matter was given publicity and naturally used
to Blunt’s political detriment. Actually the legal ownership of
the property — about 40 acres in scattered parcels interwoven
with a larger settled estate of her father, the Earl of Lovelace and
managed by his agent — was vested in a trustee. Lady Anne had
only a limited interest in it under peculiar circumstances which
prevented her exercising independent management. She was not
consulted when notice was served on the tenants though her
name was used on the notice. Immediately she heard of the
matter she had it looked into. No injustice or harshness was
found. The tenant, being in arrear with his rent, had received
at Lady-Day an ordinary six-months notice to quit and had
left at Michaelmas with his family. He was not destitute, and
he took his belongings with him and had a home to go to. After
considerable correspondence in The Times the affair was dropped.

2. The Irish Land League was a great organization comprising all the page 227
tenants’ defence societies in the country. It held its first meeting

39 °

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

in Dublin on October 21st, 1 879. Its slogan was, ‘Ireland for the
Irish and the land for the people.’

page 229 3. ‘He has given up wine,’ wrote Jehu Junior in Vanity Fair , January
31st, 1885, ‘as a matter of principle, and tobacco as a matter of
health.’ On May 28th, 1898, Blunt recorded in his diary, ‘I have
taken to wine after 15 years total abstinence.’

page 229 4. Lady Gregory could never quite forgive Blunt for his Irish doings.

Years later she wrote that it was a pity he was not in Ireland,
it would be so easy to get himself imprisoned — c and think what
good letters you could write from prison and you could finish all
your poems’.

page 230 5. The Plan of Campaign was a plan for renewed agrarian agitation
worked out by William O’Brien, John Dillon and Tim Har-
rington. On each estate where the landlord had refused to lower
the rent reasonably the tenants were to contribute to a common
fund an amount equal to what they thought a fair rent. This fund
was to be managed by a committee who, backed by the fund,
could either persuade the landlord to accept a fair rent or, in the
case of need, support the evicted tenants.

page 232 6. Balfour’s Crimes Act was enacted in April 1887. It had all the worst
features of past coercion bills with the added insupportable
feature of being unlimited to any certain number of years.

CHAPTER XII

page 251 1. In a letter to The Times published on March 23rd after his release,
Blunt re-stated his case, and answered the criticism that the
conversation with Balfour was improbable by saying that Bal-
four’s words were perhaps intended as a warning to him and
through him to the Irish leaders, for Balfour undoubtedly would
have preferred his opponents to fly to America rather than stay
to be imprisoned by him; that the language of Balfour’s remarks
was such as certain circles habitually applied to the Irish question;
that Balfour at the time of the conversation had almost no
personal knowledge of the forces he had to deal with in Ireland;
that the policy he announced in the conversation had for a short
time been carried out. The conversation Blunt said was entirely
serious and took place on Sunday, September 4th, 1887, at about
5 p.m. between the two men alone. Balfour replied to this letter
by dubbing Blunt’s statement ‘a grotesque and ridiculous false-

NOTES

39 1

hood’, saying that he never wished the death of any Irish repre-
sentative, and holding Blunt responsible for the garbled accounts
of his statement published during his imprisonment. Blunt retorted
that, as his requests in prison to make the statement on oath or
to have it reported verbatim in writing, or to have his solicitor
present, were all refused he was hardly responsible for its various
versions. Balfour continued to deny the Clouds conversation,
passing Blunt’s charges off with bland humour, and the affair
faded away. William O’Brien voiced the opinion held by Blunt’s
Irish supporters in a speech in Ireland: T knew that Mr. Blunt
was a man who would let his hand wither away in the fire before
he would tell a lie.’

2. Peter O’Brien: Solicitor General for Ireland, 18875 Attorney page 252

General, 1888; Lord Chief Justice, 18895 made a baronet,

189x5 raised to the peerage as Baron O’Brien of Kilfenora, 1900.

3. Possibly Blunt’s support of the Plan of Campaign was the cause of page 2$$

Parnell’s failure to uphold him. The question of how far Parnell
opposed the Plan is difficult to answer. In his speech at the
Eighty Club dinner on May 8th, 1888 — at which Blunt also
had been asked to speak but had refused in order to see Dillon
through his trial — Parnell gave his first public indication of
repudiating the Plan, and yet he remarked to Lady Anne, next
whonThe was sitting, that the Plan had been ‘the saving of the
Irish people’. As regards his sending no word of sympathy to
Blunt — that is amply explained by his carefully fostered hatred
of the English and equally well-cultivated manner of indifference.

CHAPTER XIII

1 . The picturesque story of a tragedy resulting from his protection even page 260

of wolves is told in characteristic fashion by Blunt in his diary for
February 14th, 1901. (My Diaries , Vol. 11).

2. It begins with the unpromising verses: page 261

Care killed a cat and I have many cares at home
Which vex me mightily and disturb my bed.

The Poem as a whole, however, though less fine than many of
the Sonnets of Proteus, is good.

3. Known familiarly as Chanclebury Ring. page 274

4. The members of the first Crabbet Club ‘consisted besides the Herbert page 27 6

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

3 9 2

brothers, of Eddy Hamilton, Lord Lewisham, Jocelyn Amherst,
Granny Farquhar, Lionel Bathurst, with Harry Brand (after-
wards Lord Hampden), Nigel Kingscote, Godfrey Webb, Button
Bourke, Frank Lascelles, Mark Napier, and half-a-dozen more 5
of Blunt’s own intimates.

page 282 5. The first three chapters — ‘through the horses of Greece and Rome’
— were finished and parts of later chapters. Blunt had made
extensive researches concerning the horse, had read widely,
talked with many scholars — Huxley, Wallace, and others —
even studied the fossil bones of primeval horses in the Natural
History Museum and visited Prevalsky’s horse at the Zoo. Both
he and Lady Anne were greatly helped in gathering material for
their ‘horse books’ by Sydney Cockerell, at that time Blunt’s
secretary. Lady Wentworth, in her comprehensive study of the
horse. Thoroughbred Racing Stocky says that she has used the vast
store of material amassed by her parents ‘as a quarry in which to
find everything relating to horse history’. It will doubtless also
furnish much material for her specialized study, The Authentic
Arabian Horse.

page 283 6. The Stealing of the Mare is dedicated ‘To Charles Doughty, Esq., in
recognition of His Knowledge, the most complete among English-
men, of Arabian things.’ ‘I am reading Doughty’s book about
Arabia,’ Blunt noted in his diary of April 26th, 1888, ‘which is
by far the best ever written. It is exhaustive and accurate,
though less sympathetic with Arabian ideas than I expected. He
sees the worse rather than the better nature of the people.’

page 287 7. In response to Lord Dufferin’s request for one of Blunt’s books to put
in ‘Helen’s Tower Library’ — ‘a library where he had got together
400 volumes presented by authors, and which is named after his
mother’ — Blunt gave Lord Dufferin a copy of the Kelmscott
edition of his Proteus Sonnets . In it he inscribed a sonnet, the
first letters of whose lines spelled Dufferin’s mother’s name.
Blunt’s inscribed sonnet was privately printed with the poems
inscribed by their authors in the 400 other volumes.

CHAPTER XIV

page 301 1. Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 1908—1937.

page 301 2. To his profound disgust Blunt soon learned that the rumour which he
had heard months before was true, the well was to be leased to a

NOTES

393

soda water company at £ 500 a year. Father Beauclerk, in charge
of the shrine seemed ‘sadly impractical’, so Blunt gave him ‘a
cheque for £20 towards legal expenses’, but determined to put the
case in other hands. In London he saw a lawyer and soon news
came that the Duke of Westminster, Lord of the Manor in
which the well was situated, would take action in the matter. In
the end the shrine was preserved.

3. At rare intervals throughout his early and middle life Blunt had page 3 1 7
debated, if not going up to the University, at least living at Oxford.

And in 1899 he told York Powell, whom he was visiting at
Christ Church, that he had half seriously consulted Jowett
fifteen years earlier about the possibility of his entering the
University as an undergraduate. ‘Jowett said “You could never
pass the examination for Balliol, but might try Christ Church.”
“Insolent dog,” said Powell, resenting the slur on his college.’

chapter xv

1. The two portraits may be found side by side in Archibald Henderson’s page 322

Biography of Shaw, 191 1, opposite page 260.

Neville Lytton’s fine chalk drawing of Blunt himself, done at
about this time, was sold to an American in 1914.

2. Blunt’s prison article appeared in the English Review , September page 324

1910. He wrote a supplementary article for the Observer ,
September 18th, 1910.

In 1906 when the Education Bill came on, Blunt had sug-
gested an education policy to George Wyndham, leader of the
opposition, which he promised to follow. It was extremely con-
servative: the three R’s were to be compulsory and paid for by the
State. ‘No child should be compelled to go beyond this or to
attend school after 12 years old.’ This State school was to be
undenominational. Each denomination should provide more
advanced schooling for its members if they wished it. ‘This
would certainly be enough in the country schools, and would
help to keep labourers on the land.’

3. Gordon at Khartoum and The Land War were published by Stephen page 328

Swift & Company. In mid-October 1912, Swift (alias Granville)
absconded with the till including £55 of Blunt’s.

4. Shaw’s preface to John Bull's Other Island upholds Blunt’s point of page 329

394 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

view on the Denshawai affair. Blunt also gave Shaw the sugges-
tion for The Doctor’s Dilemma .

page 330 5. Sir Charles Rivers Wilson: Comptroller of Egyptian National debt,
1874; Minister of Finance for a short time under the Khedive
Ismail; President of International Commission of Liquidation;
Member of Council of Suez Canal; etc. . . . Though deeply
imbued with the financial and anti-Nationalist point of view, he
told Blunt that both Gordon at Khartoum and Egypt’s Ruin were
very accurate and had converted him on many points regarding
Egypt.

page 336 6. The eight poets were: Richard Aldington, F. S. Flint, Frederic
Manning, John Masefield (who in the end was unable to get to
Newbuildings for the occasion), Sturge Moore, Victor Plarr,
Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats.

page 337 7 - Blunt had made acquaintance, through Lord Lytton in 1870, with
Count Gobineau when he was in sore financial straits and the
Prussians were in occupation of his country house. Blunt helped
him and after the war became his close friend. T have,’ Blunt
wrote, ‘some thirty or forty of his letters, chiefly on literary
subjects, and his own private copy of his celebrated book Sur
L’inegalite de Races Humaines. ... He was a very agreeable man
with much imagination, a bit of a poet and a bit of an artist,
besides being an excellent talker on all subjects.’ In 1913 Blunt
said that Gobineau was in some ways like himself, ‘a man of ideas
opposed to those of his own people and his own generation, and
who, though his talent was recognized as a writer, failed to find
disciples in France. He was an aristocrat in a democratic age, an
orientalist, out of harmony with received orientalist ideas, a
poet who was never popular, and an artist who was never more
than an amateur. . . . Gobineau like me had his romantic side.’

CHAPTER XVI

page 343 1. In connection with the talk prevalent in 1917 of the evils of
secret diplomacy and the hypocrisy, and worse, to which it led,
Blunt wrote, ‘I think I was quite the first person to expose the
danger of this secrecy as a cause of war. I did this in a lecture I
gave at Toynbee Hall some thirty years ago with Frederic Harri-
son in the chair.’

NOTES

395

2. As early as 1904 when he was still squire at Crabbet, he had worked page 355

out a scheme for the better housing of the poorer tenants in pur-
suance of a plan published by him in the Nineteenth Century .

He erected according to his own plans a labourer’s cottage at
Blackwater, one of the Crabbet farms, of galvanized iron to
prove that such cottages might be put up more cheaply than the
old sort and would be healthier but would call for less rent.

The scheme brought him much approbation notably an enthusi-
astic letter from Charles Dougthy, though the cottage contra-
vened the by-laws of the rural council. (The by-laws were later
made more liberal and up to date.) Two years afterwards he
wrote an article for the Nineteenth Century on ‘Possibilities of
Peasant Ownership in Sussex,’ based on a plan for the wider
distribution of land by the sub-division of large estates.

3. When his Estate Agent, Caffin, told Blunt of the outcome of the sale page 358

tears ran down Blunt’s cheeks: ‘It has taken three hundred
years for my family to build up this estate,’ he said, ‘and now in a
minute it is gone.’

4. Lady Anne came into the title on the death of Mary, daughter of her page 359

brother Ralph by his first marriage. On Lady Anne’s death the
title descended to the Blunts’ daughter Judith, the present Lady
Wentworth.

5. In ancient times the title would have entitled Blunt as Lady Anne’s page 359

husband to a seat among the Peers. ‘Now it will bring no new
dignity or advantage of any but a genealogical kind, but as such is
worth claiming.’

6. Blunt took for the model of the monument for Lady Anne’s grave page 359

one of the eighteenth-century simple rectangular .tombs in Shipley
Churchyard. He drew it to scale and with Sydney Cockerell’s
help had the English inscription for one side put into good
eighteenth-century script. On the other side the inscription was
to be done into Arabic. On the two ends were to go the coats
of arms.

7. The only bequest that he made to a Roman Catholic institution was for page 371

the up-keep of the chapel and monument to his brother and sister
in the Franciscan Monastery at Crawley. He bequeathed to
Professor Edward G. Browne, Professor of Arabic in Cambridge
University, ^200 asking him to apply it as a subscription to any
mosque that might be built by the voluntary subscription of

396 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

Mohammedans in London of which Professor Browne might
approve. He also left a sum to the Quakers — and no one suspects
him of being a Quaker. Perhaps the safest way is to believe his
own words spoken in his old age to the effect that he held no one
creed or system of religious belief.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

No attempt is made to name the various editions of the following books
or to list either articles or letters written by Blunt or articles concerning
him that have been published in journals. References to articles used in
the text are noted therein.

POETRY BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

* Sonnets and Songs by Proteus; London, John Murray, 1875.

Love Sonnets of Proteus; C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1881.

The Wind and The Whirlwind; London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.,
1883.

In Vinculis; London, Kegan Paul, 1889.

A New Pilgrimage and Other Poems; London, Kegan Paul, Trench &
Co., 1889.

Esther , Love Lyrics and Natalia’ s Resurrection; London, Kegan Paul,
Trench & Trubner, 1892.

Love Lyrics and Songs of Proteus with the Love Sonnets of Proteus;
Kelmscott Press, 1892.

The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare; London, Reeves &
Turner, 1892.

Griselda, a Society Novel in Rhymed Verse; London, Kegan Paul, Trench
& Trubner, 1893.

The Poetry of Wilfrid Blunt , selected and arranged by W. E. Henley and
George Wyndham; London, Heinemann, 1898.

Satan Absolved; London & New York, John Lane, 1899.

The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia , Known also as the Moallakat;

London, Chiswick Press, 1903.

Fand of the Fair Cheek; privately printed, 1904.

The Bride of the Nile; privately printed, 1907.

* Poetical Works , Complete Edition; 2 vols.5 London, Macmillan, 1914.
Poems; New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

*PROSE BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

Proteus and Amadeus , A Correspondence , edited by Aubrey De Vere;
London, C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1878.

397

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

39 8

The Future of Islam; London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882.

Ideas about India ; London, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1885.

Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, Being a Personal Nar-
rative of Events; London, Fisher Unwin, 1907.

Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt, Part II India, Being a
Personal Narrative of Events; London, privately printed, 1907.

India Under Ripon , A Private Diary . . . . Continued from His Secret
History of the English Occupation of Egypt; London, Fisher Unwin,
I9 ° 9 *

Gordon at Khartoum, Being a Personal Narrative of Events in Continua-
tion of A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt; London,
Stephen Swift & Co., 1912.

The Land War in Ireland, Being a Personal Narrative of Events in Con-
tinuation of A Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt;
London, Stephen Swift & Co., 1912.

History of the Crabbet Estate in Sussex, Part I; privately printed, 1917.

History of the Crabbet Arabian Stud, Part 1 ; privately printed.

My Diaries, Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888—1914; 2 vols.;
London, Martin Seeker, 1919 & 1920.

^PAMPHLETS

The Shame of the Nineteenth Century, privately printed 1900.

The Military Fox-Hunting Case at Cairo, A Supplement to Blue Book
Egypt 3, 1901, Printed for Presentation to Both Houses of Parlia-
ment, March 1902.

Letter to the Marquess of Salisbury, K.G.; privately printed, May 1902.

Letter to the Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Grey, Bart., M.P., privately printed,
May 1908.

Atrocities of Justice Under British Rule in Egypt; London, T. Fisher
Unwin, 1906.

Mr. Blunt and The Times , privately printed 1907.

Francis Thompson; reprinted from The Academy , November, 1907.

The New Situation in Egypt; London, Burns & Oates, 1908.

Lettre Addressee au Congres National Egyptien k Paris; privately printed,
1910.

The Fiasco in Egypt; privately printed, 1910.

The Italian Horror and How to End it; London, Bonner, 19 n.

Extracts from Mr. John Baker’s Horsham Diary; reprinted from
Sussex Archaeological Society’s Collections, 1909, Vol. Ill, p. 88.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

399

BOOKS CONTAINING WORK BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

* Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates by Lady Anne Blunt; Edited with a

Preface and Some Account of the Arabs and their Horses by Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt, 2 vols.; London, John Murray, 1879.

*A Pilgrimage to Nejd , The Cradle of the Arab Race by Lady Anne
Blunt; 2 vols.; London, John Murray, 1881.

Encyclopaedia of Sport; 2 vols.; London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1897.

(See The Arabian Horse by W. Blunt.)

* Personal and Literary Letters of Robert , First Earl of Lytton; edited by
Lady Betty Balfour, 2 vols.; London, Longmans Green, 1906.
Egypt's Ruin , A Financial and Administrative Record by Theodore
Rothstein, London, Fi field, 1910.

* Selected Poems by Lady Margaret Sackville; London, Constable, 1919.
Many anthologies — including the Oxford Book of English Verse —

contain poems by Blunt.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

* A linger Harvest, E. M. Forster; London; Edward Arnold, 1936.

A Literary History of the Arabs , Reynold A Nicholson; Cambridge,
University Press, 1930.

Alice Meynell \ a memoir , Viola Meynell; London, Jonathan Cape, 1929.
An Autobiography , Margot Asquith; 2 vols.; New York, Thornton
Butterworth, 1920.

Arabia Felix , Bertram Thomas; London, Jonathan Cape, 1932.

Arabia of the Wahhabis , H. St. J. B. Philby; London, Constable, 1928.
Arthur James Balfour 3 First Earl of Balfour , Blanche Elizabeth C.

Dugdale; 2 vols.; London, Hutchinson, 1936.

Astarte , Ralph , Earl of Lovelace', London, printed at the Chiswick Press,

* Autobiographic Memoir s, Frederic Harrison; 2 vols.; London, Macmil-

lan, 1911.

Byron , Ethel Colburn Mayne; New York, Constable & Co., 1912.
Central and Eastern Arabia (1862—1863), William Gifford Palgrave;
2 vols.; London, Macmillan, 1865.

Don Roberto . Being the Account of the Life and Works of R. B. Cunning-
hame Graham 1852—1936, A. F. Tschiffely; London, Heinemann,
* 937 -

Early Life and Letters of John Morley , F. W. Hirst; 2 vols., London,
Macmillan, 1865.

Egypt and the Egyptian Question , D. Mackenzie Wallace; London,
Macmillan, 1883.

Flame of Life , Lady Wentworth; London, Murray, 1930.

Gordon and the Sudan , Bernard M. Allen; London, Macmillan, 1931.
How We Defended Arabi and His Friends , A. M. Broadley; London,
Chapman & Hall, 1884.

Ismtiil the Maligned Khedive , Pierre Crabites; London, Routledge, 1933*
John Bull's Other Island, George Bernard Shaw; London, Constable &
Co., 1908.

*King Edward VII , A Biography, Sir Sidney Lee; 2 vols.; London,
Macmillan, 1925.

400

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

401

* Life and Letters of George Wyndham , J. W. Mackail & Guy Wynd-

ham, 2 vols.; London, Hutchinson.

Life of Robert , Marquis of Salisbury , Lady Gwendolen Cecil; 4 vols.;

London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1921.

Lord Cromer , Being the Authorised Life of Evelyn Baring , F/rr/ ifor/ of
Cromer , The Marquess of Zetland; London, Hodder and Stough-
ton, 1932.

Memoir of Ralph, Earl of Lovelace^ Mary Countess of Lovelace; London,
Christophers, 1920.

Memoir of Thomas George , Earl of Northbrook, G.C.S.I ., Bernard Malet;

London, Longmans Green, 1908.

Men Were Different , Shane Leslie; London, Michael Joseph, 1937.

* Modern Egypt , The Earl of Cromer; 2 vols.; London, Macmillan,

1908 — Supplement: Abbas II.

Moberley Bell and His Times, an unofficial narrative , F. Harcourt
Kitchin; London, Allan, 1925.

Orientations, Ronald Storrs; London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937.
Ouida , a Study in Ostentation, Yvonne ffrench; London, Cobden-
Sanderson, 1938.

Parnell , A Biography, Joan Haslip; London, published 1937.

Portraits , Desmond MacCarthy; London & New York, Putnam, 1931.
Queen Victoria , Lytton Strachey; London, Chatto & Windus, 1921.
Redeemed , R. B. Cunninghame Graham; Heinemann.

* Sir Arthur Nicolson, Bart., First Lord Carnock , Harold Nicolson; London,

Constable, 1930.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom , T. E. Lawrence; London, Jonathan Cape,
* 935 -

Shifting Scenes , Sir Edward Malet; London, Murray, 1901.

Supers and Supermen , Philip Guedalla; London & New York, Putnam’s
Sons, 1924.

Doctor's Dilemma , George Bernard Shaw; London, Constable, 191 1.
The English Country Gentleman , Neville Lytton; London, Hurst &
Blackett, 1925.

The Journals of Major-Gen . C. G. Gordon, C.B., at Khartoum , A. Eg-
mont Hake; London, Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885.

The Life and Letters of Anne Isabella , Lady Noel Byron , Ethel Colburn
Mayne; London, Constable, 1929.

The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer , David Duncan; London,
Methuen, 1908.
cc

402 WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

The Life of Granville George Leveson Gower , Second Earl Granville , Lord
Edmond Fitzmaurice; 2 vols.; London, Longmans Green, 1905.
The Life of Sir Richard Burton , Thomas Wright; 2 vols.; London,
Everett, 1906.

The Life of Sir William Harcourt , A. G. Gardiner; 2 vols.; London,
Constable, 1923.

The Life of the Marquis of Duff erin and Ava , Sir Alfred Lyall; 2 vols.;
London, Murray, 1905.

*The Life of the Rt . Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke , Stephen Gwynn & Ger-
trude M. Tuckwell; 2 vols.; London, Murray, 1917.

*The Life of William Ewart Gladstone , John Morley; 3 vols.; London,
Macmillan, 1903.

The Making of Modern Egypt , Sir Auckland Colvin; London, Seeley,
1906.

The Modern World Series, London, Benn:

Arabia , H. St. J. B. Philby; 1930.

Egypt y George Young; 1927.

India, Sir Valentine Chirol; 1930.

Ireland , Stephen Gwynn; 1924.

*The Queen and Mr. Gladstone , Philip Guedalla; 2 vols.; London,
Hodder & Stoughton, 1933.

*The Penetration of Arabia , David George Hogarth; London, Alston
Rivers, 1905.

The River War , An Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, London,
Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933.

*The Theatre of Life , 1 863-1905, Esme Howard; London, Hodder &
Stoughton, 1935.

The Transition of Egypt , Lieut.-Col. P. G. Elgood; London, Arnold,
1928.

The Unveiling of Arabia^ R. H, Kiernan; London, Harrap, 193 7.
Versions and Perversions , Father Tyrrell; London, Elkin Mathews.
Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women , Virginia Woolf;
London, Hogarth Press, 1926.

Thoroughbred Racing Stocky Lady Wentworth; London, Allen & Unwin,

1938-

Toy Dogs and Their Ancestors , The Hon. Mrs. Neville Lytton; London,
Duckworth, 1911.

Travels in Arabia Desert a , Charles M. Doughty; London, Jonathan
Cape, 1921.

INDEX

Aalem, peaks OF, p 6
Abbas II, see Khedive
Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 316-17
Abd-el Kader, Seyyid, 90, 132
Abdin Palace, 135, 218
Abdu, Sheykh Mohammed, 130, 139,

1 97> 3 00 ? 318-20.
brother of, 349

Abdul Hamid II, see Sultan of Turkey
Abu Klea, the battle of, 199
Abulfeda, 287
Abu Nadara , 183
Abu Seriyeh, 218
Abu Zeyd, 83, 96
Abyssinia, 294
Academy , the, 323
Adeane, Charles, 373
Ahmar, Jebel, 359
Ahmed, Sir Seyd, 185
Akabah, 68, 69, 328
Aldington, Richard, 338, 394
Aleppo, 71-6, 82, 85, 132, 164, 296, 377
Alexandretta, 72

Alexandria, 151, 153, 164, 217, 259
bombardment of, 1 59, 348
burning of, 1 66, 168, 170, 383-4
riot at, 157, 158, 383-4
Algeria, 61-2, 376
Aligarh, 185

Ali Koli Khan, 10 1-4, 107, 367
‘Alms to Oblivion, The*, 283
Alverstoke, 21

America, United States of, 172, 390.
American, 324, 351, 360-1, 393
Amherst, Jocelyn, 392
Anazeh, tribes of the, 73, 82, 87, 132, 379
Aosta, Duke of, 318

Helene, Princesse de France et de

Navarre, Duchess of, 269, 313, 318
Arab horse, 13, 76, 83, 85, 87, 92, 109,
229, 267, 279, 282, 321, 334, 355,
tfo, 377, 379

Newmarket race, 117, 204-5
purchases, 74-5, 85, 377, 379
stud, the Blunts’, see Crabbet, New-
buildings, Sheykh Obeyd

403

Arab horse — cont.

other studs, 99, ior, 107, 186, 270,
292, 378, 386

Horse Society, 362

Movement, 1S82, 380

Arabi Pasha, Ahmed Bey, 135, 138-42,
144-5, *47-8> i54-7 > i59-6o, 162-9,
i75-7> *79- 8o > 2 i7> 265, 337,

382-3, 385, 387-8

Arabia, 13, 89, 91, 107, 115, 122-3, 193,
223, 282, 378, 379
the Blunts’ journeys, 1876, 68-70

1877- 8, 71-88,
377

1878- 9, 90-104,

109-11, 173,

377-9

1881, 130-2, 134,
379

Arabian, 79, 83, 86-7, 111-13, 216, 262
Blunt’s brothers, 80, 84-6, 92, 95
dress, 15, 72, 78, 90, 261, 271, 273, 325,
364

horse, see Arab horse
Arabic, 317-18, 367

language, 54, 66, 71, 78, 103, 209, 271,
373 ? 3 8 7

‘From the Arabic’, 261
Arabs, 71-2, 75, 81, 97, 107, in, 192-3,
216, 218, 228, 291, 310, 314, 319,
331, see also Bedouin
Arigna, 224-5

Ar^k, Mohammed Ibn, 82, 85-6, 92-5,
99-101, 105

Ashburnham, Bertram, 5th Earl of, 221
Asia Minor, 61, 173, 376
Asiatic Society, the, 149
Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H., later 1st Earl of
Oxford and Asquith, 242, 326

Mrs. H. H., later Countess of Oxford

and Asquith, 366
Athens, 32-4, 259

‘Atrocities of Justice Under British Rule
in Egypt’, 329
Aughrim, 223

‘The Canon of Aughrim’, 224-5

INDEX

404

Austin, Alfred, 348, 370
Austria, 293, 342, see also Vienna
Azazimeh, tribe of the, 69, 131
Azhar, el, 129-30, 136

Bagdad, 71, 73, 75- 7 * 87, i°4-5> ii6 *

325

Bailey, Mrs., see ‘Skittles’

Baker, Diary of Mr. John, 15

Pasha, Valentine, 217

Balfour, Rt. Hon. Arthur James, 1st
Earl of, 241, 243, 244, 253, 265,

3 3 g 4

conversation at Clouds, 231-3, 249-51,
2 55> 39 0_I

Balkan War, 333, 342
Baring, Sir Evelyn, see Cromer, 1st Earl
of

Bary, Father Richard de, 325
Bathurst, Lionel, 392
Bathyani, Prince, n 6
Batten, Mrs., 368

Beaman, Ardern, 164, 167, 170, 383-4
Beauclerk, Lord Osborne, later 12th Duke
of St. Albans, 324, 336-7, 366
Bedouin, 72-5, 77-81, 85, 87, 90, 93,
95-6, 100, 107, no-11, 131-2, 161,
199, 212, 217, 223, 273, 283, 294,
3*9> 3 2 5* 3^ 377

Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates , 87, 377
Beer, Mr., Governor of Kilmainham
Gaol, 254
Belgium, 342-3
Bell, C. F. Moberly, 162, 327
Bellari, 185

Belloc, Hilaire, 324, 354, 365
Benares, 185, 334

Beni Laam, tribe of the, 106-7, m
Bent, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore, 378
Berlin Congress, the, 89
Beyrout, 85
Biela-Tcherkov, 270-1
Bignor, 354

Bigorre, Bagn&res de, 19-20
Birmingham, 212-13, 389-90
Bismarck, Prince, 49-50
‘Bitters’, see Currie, Francis Gore
Blackwood, Basil, 365
Blenheim spaniels, 54
Blunt, Mrs. William Frank Wheatley,
Alice Mary, 18-22, 26, 29-30, 37-8,
58. 35 8 > 3 «5> 376

Blunt, Anne Isabella King — Noel, Lady
Anne, later 15th Baroness Went-
worth, 53-62, 87, 89, 123, 153, 179,
205, 210, 215-16, 235, 259, 277, 292,
311, 313, 329, 356-7, 360-2, 371,
376-9, 389, 391-2, 395
in Arabia, 68-9, 71-86, 90-106, 109-n,
130-2

in Egypt, 66-8, 137, 177, 217-18, 260,

264, 294-5, 299, 304-5, 315, 357-9

in India, m-12, 182, 184-6
in Ireland, 236-41, 244-5
in Persia, 104-5, I0 7"9
marriage, 52-3

Francis Scawen, Blunt’s brother,

18-21, 23, 26, 29, 33, 36-7, 57-9,
35 8 > 3<55> 376

Francis Scawen, Blunt’s father,

16-17, 355

Gerald, 16, 342

Harry, 15-16

Judith Anne Dorothea, the Hon.

Mrs. Neville Lytton, later 16th
Baroness Wentworth, 58, 264, 292,
29 5* 3°5> 33 8 * 356 -Sj 360, 362, 392,
395

Mary, see Wyndham, Mrs., later

Baroness Leconfield

Mary Chandler, Mrs., Blunt’s

mother, 17-26, 355

Robert, 15

Samuel, 15-16, 373

General Walter, Pasha, 292

Wilfrid Scawen, Blunt’s son, 58

William, 15

Winifred Scawen, 15, 16, 373

Boers, 304, 308
Bombay, 186, 205, 385
Boulanger, General, 258
Bourke, Hon. Algernon, ‘Button’, 145-6,
152, 162-4, 167-8, 196, 198, 226,
2 7i> 3*9> 3 8 4> 388-9> 392
Rt. Hon. Robert, later Baron Con-
nemara, 145

Hon. Terence, 271-2, 295, 305, 367

Bowles, Thomas Gibson, 199
Bradford, 4th Earl, 116
Brazza, Comte de, 116
Brand, Harry, Sir Henry, 2nd Viscount
Hampden, 113, 153, 392
Branicka, Countess, 270
Brazil, 51-2

INDEX

Bride of the Nile , The , 287
Bridges, Robert, 338
Bright, John, 165, 197
Brighton, 270, 304, 307
Brindisi, 164, 313

British Home Rule League or Union, 212,
221, 229, 234, 236-7
Broadley, A. M., 163-4, 167-70, 3S3
Brock, Ten, 116

Brocklehurst, Sir Philip Lancaster, 386

Brooke, Rupert, 338

Browne, Prof. E. G., 367, 396

Buddhism, 318

Buenos Aires, 51-2

Bulgarian, 71-2

Burmese War, 201-2

Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, 302-3, 338

Burrows, General, 123-4

Burton, Sir Richard Francis, 51-2

Bushire, 105, 109, m, 116

‘Button’, see Bourke, Hon. Algernon

Byrne, Inspector, 238-9, 241, 251

Byron, Ada, Lady Lovelace, 53-4

Anne Isabella Milbanke, Lady, 53-5,

57 > 361

George Gordon, Lord, 14, 17, 27,

3 3 "4? 53~4> & 118, 129, 138, 144,
154,284,318,376

Cairo, 161-4, 167-70, 200, 260, 305, 314,
332, 3 57> 385
Blunt at, 1875-6, 66, 68
1880, 129-30
1881-2, 141, 143-4, 146
1883, 178, 195
1887-98, 217, 260, 264, 272,
288, 293, 295
1901-2, 315
Calcutta, 185-6, 189, 202
Calthorpe, 6 th Baron, 116
Camberwell, 208-10, 220
Cambridge, 221, 242, 283, 392, 396
Cameron, Mrs. Julia Margaret, 25, 305,
374

Captain Verney Lovett, 105, 116

Cape Verde Islands, 356
Carleton, Miss Dorothy, 365
Carlisle, George Howard, 9th Earl of,
146? 1 5 8 > 3 88 > 3 8 9

Countess of, 36, 146, 157-8,

177, 204, 211-12, 233-4, 258, 304,
389

405

Carnegie, Lady Helena, 366
Carnock, Sir Arthur Nicolson, 1st Lord,
3 8 4-5

Casement, Sir Roger, 344, 366

Castle Island, 228

Cattawayo, see Cetewayo

Cave, Sir Stephen, 68

Cetewayo, s66, 383

Ceylon, 138, 169, 177, 179-83

Chamberlain, Rt- Hon. Joseph, 212-3

Chanctonbury Ring, 274, 392

Chapel Street, 316, 320, 3.34

Chapman and Hall, 286

Chaucer, 281

Chenery, Thomas, 139, 145, 150, 164,
380

Chester, 234, 300
Chibine , S.S., 310-13
Chirol, Sir Valentine, 385
Chronicle , the, 308

Churchill, Lord Randolph, 170, 197,
200-1, 207-11, 242, 324, 389

Hon. Winston, 303, 324-6, 366

Hon. Mrs. Winston, 324-5, 366

Cintra, 46-7, 266, 375
Circassian, 135, 151, 173, 180, 380
Clanricarde, 2nd Marquis of, 224, 236,
249-50

Clark, Sir Andrew, 244
Clonfert, Bishop of, see Dr. Duggan
‘Coalition Against Germany, The’, My
Diaries 11, 348

Cockerell, Sir Sydney, 301-2, 310, 318-19,
366, 392, 395

Coercion Act, see Crimes Act
Colombo, 179-83

Colvin, Sir Auckland, 138-44, 147-8,
158-9, 182, 380-1, 384, 387
Congo, 343

Constantinople, Blunt at, 34-5, 60-1,
197-8, 291-2, 375

Conference of European Powers, 158,
3 8 3

1 18, 123, 200-1, 260, 343, 347
Copts, 173
Cowen, Joseph, 221
Cowie, Isabella, 179, 210, 236, 301
Cowper, Hon. Henry, 203
Crabbet, 16, 18, 20, 37, 57-8, 60, 132,
152, 160, 209, 213, 226, 228, 235,
251, 270, 274, 276, 279, 290, 318,
3 5 2 > 35 8 > 376, 39 5

INDEX

406

Crabbet — cont,

Arab stud, 54, 86, 116-17, 203-4, 25S,
2 7o> 277, 352, 357, 359-62, 368,
376~7> 379

Club, 275-80, 326, 392
History of, 15, 352

Crawley, Monastery of the Franciscan
Fathers, 37, 58-9, 325, 365, 368,
375? 395" 6

Crimes Act, 232-3, 237, 241, 244-5, 253,

2 55? 390

Croke, Archbishop, 227-8
Cromer, Evelyn Baring, 1st Earl of,
178-9? 192, 194-5, 200, 217, 265,
287-90, 293, 305, 312, 315, 319,
328-30, 349, 384, 387
Currie, Bertram, 374

Francis Gore, ‘Bitters’, 57, 266,

282, 374

George, 374

Henry, 26, 374

the family of, 26, 30, 374
Lawrence, 277

Mary Montgomerie, ‘Violet Fane’,

Lady, 374

Sir Philip, later 1st Baron, 87, 120,

146, 270, 374

Curzon, George, later rst Marquis Curzon
of Kedleston, 277-8, 326
Cust, ‘Harry’, Henry John Cockayne, 277
Cyprus, 88-9

the Convention of, 88-9, 119, 343

Daily Chronicle , the, 318
Daily News, the, 236, 242, 329
Damascus, 74, 83-5, 90-3, 132, 164, 271,
275? 3i3? 367? 379
Darwin, Charles, 23, 36, 172
Davitt, Michael, 222, 227, 230-1, 233
Deane, Mrs., 223
Decameron, The, 321
De La Warr, 8th Earl, 159, 163-4, 168-9
Delhi, 186, 192-3
Denshawai, 329, 394
Deptford, 210, 219, 242, 244, 251, 253,
*55

Derby, the 276, 279-80
De Vere, Aubrey, 374
Deyr, 73-5, 81-2, 377
Dieppe, 57

Digby, Jane, see Lady Ellenborough
Dilam, 105, 108

Dilke, Rt. Hon. Sir Charles Wentworth,
123, 146-7, 380

Dillon, John, 226, 232-4, 237, 249, 255,
332, 366, 390-1

Disraeli, Rt. Hon. Benjamin, 1st Earl of
Beaconsfield, 88, 118
Dizful, 106-7
Dobrudja, plain of the, 35
Donegal, 223
Dongola, 293-4

Doughty, Charles Montagu, 98, 109, 299,
338, 367? 378-9? 392? 395
Douglas, Lord Alfred, 277
Downing Street, 119, 122, 139, 145, 153,
158-9, 178

Dublin, 221, 227, 230-1, 236-7, 241,
245, 248-9, 251-3, 316, 390
Dufferin, Frederick, 1st Marquis of
Dufferin and Ava, 33, 159, 167-9,
287, 392

Countess of, later Countess of Gifford,

33? 287, 392

Dugdale, Mrs. Blanche E. C., 384
Duggan, Dr., Bishop of Clonfert, 223-4
241? 245

Edwar d, Prince of Wales, see Edward VII

VII, King, 159-60, 208, 211, 313,

328, 348

Egypt? 14? 89, 1 14, 1 17? 122, 137-8,
149-57? 159-60, 163-6, 170, 176,
177? 179, 181-3, i9°-i? 192-3? 195-6?
198, 200-1, 212, 216, 218, 220, 230,
257, 268, 270, 276, 287, 290, 304,
309? 3i5? 318-19, 328-9, 332, 343,
347-8, 3 57-9? 366, 381-8
Blunt in, 1875-6, 66-8
1880, 129-30
1881-2, 134-44
1883, 178-9, 195
1887, 216-18

1888- 9, 257-61

1889- 90, 264-5

1890- 8, 266-7, 272-4, 288-

9 1 ? 293-5? 300

1899-1905, 310, 313, 315,
319-20

Egypt, 332, 334

Egypt, The Secret History of the English

Occupation of, see Secret History

Egyptian, 159, 178, 191, 201, 220, 256,
265, 272, 324, 326, 366-7, 381-5

INDEX

40 7

Egyptian — cont.

Nationalism, 13, *37? 33°

Nationalist, 122, 132, 135-6, 139-40,
142-3, 148, 151, 153, 156, 162-3,
176-80, 260, 293, 330, 385
Nationalists, 132, 135-7? *39-45> x 47~
50, 154, 1 56, 158-61, 167, 169-70,
174, 176, 177, 183, 259, 380, 383
War, 1882, 160-1, 175-6, 187, 209,
223, 344

Elcho, Lord, later nth Earl of Wemyss,
273? 2 77

Ellenborough, Jane Digby, Lady, 90

English Review, the, 393

Epsom, 276, 279-80

Errington, W. V., 159

Esther , 44, 284-7

Euboea, 259

Euphrates Valley, 71, 73-4, 75-6

Railway scheme, 87-8, 105, 116, 378-9
Euting, J., 109, 378
Evelyn, Sir John, 219, 242, 251
Eversley, George Shaw-Lefevre, Baron,
see Shaw-Lefevre
Eye-Witness , the, 324

Fand of the Fair Che eh, 316-17
Faris, Sheykh of the Northern Shammar,
79-80, 104
Farman, E. E., 384
Fashoda, 303
Fayoum, the, 295-6
Ferdinand, King of Portugal, 47, 375
Fernando, Don, see Ferdinand, King
Fernycroft, 305, 309, 316, 363
‘Fiasco in Egypt, The’, 330
Finlay, George, 33
Fitzwilliam Museum, 283, 392
Flint, F. S., 394
Florence, 375
Fogliano, 216, 2 66
Forster, E. M., 366

Rt. Hon. W. E., 232

Fortnightly Review, the, 116, 119, 188,379
Foxhunting case, the, 314-15, 319
Fox, St. George Lane, 277
France, 19-22, 31, 57, 62, 138, 261-2,
270, 284, 326, 330, 343, 347, 366,
381-2, see also Paris
Franciscan Monastery, see Crawley
rankfort, 36, 38-40, 48-50, 370
Freeman, the, 248

French, 17, 89, 133, 140, 147, 153-4,
322, 34 2 -3? 3 8 *

Frere, Sir Bartle, 113

Major, 238, 240-1

Friends, Society of, see Quakers
Froude, James Anthony, 211-12
Future of Islam, The, 346, 379-80

Gaisford, Lady Alice, 244
Galway, County gaol, 245-51, 253
244, 249-50
Gambetta, Leon, 147
Gatty, Charles, 277, 287
Gaudier-Brzeska, 337
Gaza, 132

George, Rt. Hon. David Lloyd, 347
Gerard, Father John, S. J., 23
Germans, 50, 343

Germany, 34, 50, 57, 118, 293, 330-1,
342-3, 346, 375, 382, see also

Frankfort
Ghoorha, S. S., 179
Gladstone, Miss, 219, 229

Rt. Hon. W. E.

Egypt, 117-20, 122, 131, 137-8, 170,
178, 187, 204, 206, 374, 379, 386
1882, 143-9, I 5 I "5? i 57 _ 6°? 162-6,

381,383

Ireland, 210-13, 227, 243-4, 2.55-6
Soudan, 196-7, 199-200, 387-8

Mrs. W. E., 229

Glanvilles of Catchfrench, the, 15-16
Gobineau, Count, 337, 394
Godley, Sir Arthur, 381
Gordon and the Sudan, 387
Gordon, Sir Arthur, 18 1
Gordon at Khartoum, 194-5, 327, 385,
393“4

General Charles G., 117, 168, 192-6,

i99? 303? 3 86 ; 8

Colonel William, 303

Gorst, Sir Eldon, 299
Goschen, George J., 1st Viscount, 123,
132, 206, 346

Gower, George Leveson, 277
Graham, General Sir Gerald, 199-200,
388

R. B. Cunninghame, 366

Granville, Granville George, 2nd Earl,
119, 146-8, 151, 153, 158-60, 164,
167, 179? 3 8 *- 2 ? 3 88
Lady, 153

Greece, 33, 117, 131, 138, 186, 190, 199,
259, see also Athens
Greeks, 136, 259

Gregory, Lady, 137, 143, 150, 165, 169,
171, 182, 188, 224, 226, 228, 235,
246, 250, 287, 316-17, 321, 326,
33^-9, 348, 369, 371, 386, 390

Sir William, 137-9, 143, 145, 150,

1 65, 224, 250, 380

Grey, Sir Edward, later 1st Viscount
Grey of Fallodon, 328-9, 331-2,
342, 373

Grinstead, East, 318
Griselda . , 284, 352
Grogan, Father, S .J., 366
Grosvenor, ‘Dick’, 1st Baron Stalbridge,
277

Sibell Lady, 300, 373

Guarmani, Carlo, 109, 378
Guedalla, Philip, 383
Gweedore, 222-3

Hail, 95, 98-104, 378
Hajrasi, Sheykh Khalil el, 134
Haifa, Wady, 293
Halim, Prince, 155, 198, 382
Hamilton, Sir Edward, ‘Eddy’, 117,
119-20, 122, 131, 143, 149, 151-3,
158, 162, 177, 226, 276, 379, 381,
384, 386, 387, 392
Hanna, 74, 76, 92, 97, 100, 105
Harcourt, Sir William Vernon, 242-3,

305

Hardy, Thomas, 338
Harrington, ‘Tim’, T. C., 245, 390
Harrison, Frederic, 156, 158, 197, 230,
272-3, 3^2, 384, 395

Hartington, Spencer Compton, Marquis
of, later 8th Duke of Devonshire,
197, 200

Healy, ‘Tim’, T. M., 226, 252
Hearn, Lafcadio, 318
Hebe, H.M.S., 312
Hebron, 96
Hejaz, the, 122, 259

H61£ne, Princesse de France et de Navarre,
see Aosta, Duchess of
Heliopolis, 143-4, 273? 288
Hellal, Jebel, 131, 379
Henley, W. E., 287, 340
Henn, Thomas Rice, Mr. Justice, 245
Herbert brothers, the, 392

Herbert, Hon. Auberon, 2 68
George, 13 th Earl of Pembroke,

276

Sidney, later 14th Earl of Pembroke,

226, 268

Hindus, 18S, 190
Hobart Pasha, 199
Hogarth, D. G., 109-10, 378
Holywell, 300-1
Home Rule, see Irish
Hope, Edward, 221
Horner, Sir John, 268
Horse, the, 216, 279-80, 366, 375- 7, 392,
see also Arab horse
‘Horse book, the’, 54, 282, 318, 392
Horsham, 15-17, 318
Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes,
1st Baron, 138, 143, 165-6
2nd Baron, later 1st Earl of Crewe,

277

Housman, Prof. A. E., 325
Howard, Cardinal, 215

Esme, later 1st Baron Howard of

Penrith, 216, 277-9

George, later 9th Earl of Carlisle,

see Carlisle, Earl of

Mrs. George, see Carlisle, Countess

of

Hon. Hubert, 277

Hozier, Lady Blanche, 324, 3 66
Huber, C,, 109, 378
Hudson, W. H., 366
Huseyn, Khan of the Bactiari, 107
Huxley, Thomas H., 392
Hyderabad, 183-6, 188-9, 385-6

Ibrahim Pasha, Viceroy of Egypt,
259

Ideas About India, 189-91
‘Idler’s Calendar, The’, 146
Ignorance,

Poetry of the, or The Moallakat, 282
Poets of the, 317

India, 14, 16, 89, 104, m-15, 132, 145,
173, 177, 181-3, 186-92, 276, 327,
33*? 344? 366, 379? 382? 385“7
Indian, 112, 118, 133, 256, 262, 271, 326,
344? 366-7, 386

Blunt’s journey, 1880, 104, m-14
1883-4, 181-91
National Conference, 185-6, 385
Indians, 324, 367

INDEX

India Under Ripon, 191, 327
In Vinculis , 245-6, 254
Iraq, 104-6, see also Bagdad
Ireland, 14, 145, 201, 213, 216, 218-20,
226, 232-3, 237, 258, 316-17, 369,
384* 387 , 3897 39 ° _I
Blunt’s imprisonment, 245-54, 258,
260, 266

journey, 1861 or 2, 375

1886, 212, 221-8

1887, 230-1, 234-41

1888, 256
trial, 244-5,

Irish, 145, 158, 212, 214-15, 219-26,
228-30, 235, 244-5, 2 5°> 2 53> 255- 8,
276, 282, 344? 3 S 4> 39°

Home Rule, 20S-13, 218, 221-2, 224,
228-9, 233-4, 236-7, 242, 253, 276,
326, 328

Land League, 225, 227-S, 390
National League, 220-2, 232, 234,

251

Nationalism, 230, 366
Nationalist, 344
Nationalists, 207, 235
Plan of Campaign, 230, 252, 256, 384,
390-1

Islam, 98, 121-2, 129-34, 136, 173, 177,

181, 183, 271, 299, 304, 317, 320,
3 26 ? 330 ? 332-3, 347, 379

Islam , The Future of \ 132-4, 136
Ismail, Viceroy of Egypt, see Khedive
Ismailia, 131, 150, 16 1
‘Italian Horror and How to End it,
The’, 331
Italians, 293, 343

Italy, 17, 22, 60, 214-15, 229, 294, 313,
331, 342, 347, 385, see also Rome

James Street, 10, Buckingham Gate,
117, 170, 177, 201, 221, 291
Jedaan, Sheykh of the Sebaa, 73-5,
82-4

Jeddah, 122, 130-1

Jemal-ed-Din Afghani, Sheykh, 129,

182, 196, 201, 291-3, 346, 379,
388

Jerusalem, 68, 131-2
Job, Book of, 354, 371
Jobba, 97-8

Jockey Club, 116, 205
Jdf, Nejd, 85, 94-5, 378

409

Joint Note, the, 140-1, 147, 151, 381-2
Jowett, Prof. Benjamin, 36, 393

Kandahar, 123
Keay, Seymour, 186, 385-6
Kelmscott Manor, 263, 267-8
Press, 287, 392

Kenmare, Lady, wife of 4th Earl of, 37

Kenyon, George T., 221

Kerbela, 104

Kerim Khan, 107

Kerouan, 271

Kerr, Lord Schomberg, later 9th Marquis
of Lothian, 37-9, 383
Kerry, 228

Khalifa, the, Abdullah, 303, 388
Khalil, Sheykh Mohammed, 129
Khartoum, 192-3, 199, 388
Khedive, the,

Abbas II, 289-90, 298, 328, 349
Ismail, 260, 289, 348, 383, 394
Mohammed Tewfik, 134-6, 138-40,
I 5 1 ” 2 ? r 55 > 165-6, x 7 °> i 73 > 176,
178, 193? *9 6 “7> 260, 289, 380,
382-6

Kidderminster, 210, 213, 219, 229
Kilmainham gaol, 232, 251-5
King-Harman, Colonel Wentworth
Henry, 222, 225-7
Kinglake, A. W., 168
Kingscote, Sir Robert Nigel, 276, 392
Kingston, 9th Earl of, 225-6
Kipling, Rudyard, 308, 354
Kitchener, Horatio H., 1st Earl, 293,
303-4, 343

Knowles, Sir James T., 1x7, 159, 177-8,
221, 303

Lamington, 2ND Baron, 158
Land War in Ireland , The , 231-2, 246,
255-6, 328, 393.

Lane, John, 308

Lansdowne, Henry, 5th Marquis of,

3H-I5

Laprimaudaye, the Rev. Charles and
Children, 22-3

Maria Margaret, see Pollen, Mrs.

John Hungerford
Captain, 226

Lascelles, Rt. Hon. Sir Frank Cavendish,
392

‘Later Sonnets’, 339

INDEX

410

‘Later Lyrics’, 339
Lawrence, Miss Elizabeth, 301, 310, 313,

365

Colonel T. E., 367

Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, 242-3, 308
Layard, Sir Henry, 71, 88-9, 165
Leslie, Shane, 366
Leutwein, Helen, 33-4
Lewisham, Viscount, later 6th Earl of
Dartmouth, 392
Limerick, 234, 241
Lisbon, 45-6, 48
Little Left Hand, The , 287
Liverpool, 229
Locker, Frederick, 277
Loughrea, 223-4, 240-1
Lovelace, 1st Earl of, 26, 53, 389

Lady, wife of 1st Earl of, see Byron,

Ada

Lady, 2nd wife of 2nd Earl of,

359

Ralph, 13 th Baron Wentworth,

later 2nd Earl of, 53, 57, 318, 376,
395

Love Songs and Lyrics of Proteus and Love
Sonnets , 287, 392
Lowe, General Sir Drury, 162
Lowell, J. R., 153
Lucca, 22, 313
Lucknow, 185
Luggacurran, 231
Luristan, 105-7
Lyall, Sir Alfred, 112, 189
Lytton, Countess of, 104, 124, 235,
305

Hon. Neville, 305, 319, 322, 362, 393

Robert, ‘Owen Meredith’, 1st

Earl of, 46-8, 62, 104, 111-12, 11 8,
123-5, 128-9, 265-6, 282, 305, 380,
394

Lytton-Milbanke, Hon. Anne, 363

Hon. Anthony, 313, 355, 363

Hon. Winifred, Mrs. Tryon, 363

MacCarthy, Desmond, 3 66
Macdermot, Hugh Hyacinth O’Rorke,
The, 245, 252
Macmillan, 339
Madeira, 58
Madras, 185-6, 188
Madrid, 40-2
Madura, 185

Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed, the, 192-9,
204, 206, 223, 303, 343, 380, 386, 388
Malabari, Behramji, 185
Malet, Lady, wife of Sir Alexander, 36-7,
49 ? 1 57 > 3 82 “3

Rt. Hon. Sir Edward, 91, 134,

i3 6 “7> 139-41? 143-8, 153-5? 1 57 -%>
164-5, i6 7 ? 177? 289, 380-4, 387

Sir Henry, 158-9

Malkum Khan, 120-2
Malmesbury, 3rd Earl of, 31-2
Malta, 85, 272

Manchester Guardian , the, 328, 330
Manning, Frederic, 336, 394

Henry Edward, Cardinal, 17, 21,

55, 1 1 7, 159, 214, 230, 244, 256,
274

Masefield, John, 338, 394
Mayo, 7th Earl of, 145, 389
McFadden, Father, 222-3
Mecca, 101, 103, 133
MensdorfF, Count, 268
Meredith, George, 286, 308, 322
Mershid, 103-4
Meshid, Meshur Ibn, 84, 86
Mesopotamia, 73, 77-81, 87, 367
Mesrab, Mijuel el, 90
Metemneh, 199

Meynell, Dr. Charles, 27-8, 34, 371, 374

Wilfrid, 274, 323, 329, 366

Michel, Louise, 258-9
Middleton, R. W. E., 208, 389
Midhat Pasha, 76, 91, 120
Mitchelstown, 233, 235
Mivart, Dr. St. George Jackson, 309
‘Moallakat, the, or the Poetry of the
Ignorance’, 282

Moallakat \ The , or The Seven Golden
Odes of Arabia , 317
Mogul, The, 185

Mohammedan, 35, 89, 103, 122, 129-30,
177, 181-2, 184, 186, 188, 192-3,
229, 271, 300, 310-12, 326, 332,
346, 364
Mohammedans,
of Ceylon, 179-82

of India, 132-3, 181, 183-5, 187-90, 192
98, 122, 130, 132-3, 334, 396
Molony, 58, 374
Monaco, 262
Moore, George, 322
James Sturge, 394

INDEX

41 1

Morley, Rt. Hon. John, later 1st Viscount
Morley of Blackburn, 116, 150, 197,
200, 221, 226-7, 381-2
Morpeth, Charles James Stanley Howard,
Viscount, 277
Morris, Miss May, 230

William, 230, 263-4, 267, 270, 287,

302-3, 338

Mrs. William, 263-4, 302

Mortlake, 23-4
Moslem, see Mohammedan
Mount Street, Grosvenor Square, 280
Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 322

John, 318

Mycenae, 33, 259

My Diaries , 40, 318, 328, 347-9, 366,
374

Napier, Hon. Mark, 164, 167, 276-7,
305? 3*5> 357> 369* 392

Philip, 357, 359, 360

Mrs. Philip, 359

Napoleon III, 42, 57
‘Natalia’s Resurrection’, 286
Nation , the, 342

National Egyptian Congress, 330

Indian Congress, 185-6, 385

Nationalism, 145, 151, see also Egyptian,
Irish

Nationalist, see Egyptian, Irish
Nationalists, see Egyptian, Irish
Natron Valley, 274
Nauplia, 33, 259
Nazli, Princess, 217
Nefud, the, 95-7, no
Nejd, 90, 92, 95-103, 109-12, 122-3, I 3°>
172-3, 260, 272, 377-8
Nelidoff, Count, 292
Newbuildings Place, 14-15, 57-60, 270,
274 -5> 3 01 > 318, 320, 323-4, 336,
341, 345-6, 348-9, 351-2, 355, 362,
364-9, 372, 374, 394
Arab stud at, 275, 324, 357, 361-2
Blunt retires to, 334
History of, 15, 352
Newcastle, 209
New Forest, the, 268, 305
Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 374-5
Newmarket, 116-17, 204-5
New Pilgrimage, A t 128, 215, 261-3, 391-2
New Review, the, 282
‘New Situation in Egypt, The*, 330

Nicolson, Hon. Harold, 384
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 353
Nile, the, 200, 293-4, 379
Nineteenth Century , the, 116, 128, 131,
160, 165-6, 221, 266, 291, 294, 303,

379> 383> 395
Nixon, Colonel, 76, 105
Noel, Alice, 57

Edward, 34

Noels, the, 259

O’Brien, Peter, ‘Peter the Packer’,
later Baron O’Brien of Kilfenora,
252, 391

William, 226, 231, 233-7, 249, 255,

390-1

Observer , the, 393
O’Connor, T. P., 229-30, 233
Omdurman, 303, 306
Oram, the Manor of, 318
Orleans, 31
Oscott, 26-8

Otto, King of Greece, 259
Ottoman Empire, 89, hi, 13 1, 138, 328,
347, see also Turkey
Oude, Nawab Ahmet Aga, King of, 76-7,

87

Ouida, 313

Oxford, 218, 230, 242, 286, 393

Palestine, 132, 367, see also Jerusalem
Palgrave, W. Gifford, 52, 98, 109, 378-9,
379

Pall Mall Gazette, the, 150, 156, 196,
198-9, 222, 225-6, 317, 327
Palles, Christopher, Lord, Chief Baron,
252

Palmer, Edward Henry, 132, 16 1
Palmyra, 82

Pampas, the, 262, 366, 375
Papal Envoys, 230
Rescript, 256

‘Paraphrases from the French’, 339
Paris, 42-5, 57-8, 197, 201, 228-9, 258-9,
270, 284, 322, 333, 380

Comte et Comtesse de, 269

Parnell, Hon. Charles Stewart, 207-9,

«7> *S5> 39i
Parsees, 188
Patna, 183, 367
Paul, Charles Kegan, 308
• Peace Congress, The Hague, 304

INDEX

412

Pembroke, George 13 th Earl of, 276
Persia, 55, 1 04-11, 120-1, 324, 342, 367
Persian, 101-5, 108, 112, 120, 209, 367
Persians, 192, 324
Petworth, 18, 21
Petvoorth Posy, The, 354
Phiiae, 293
Phoenix Park, 151
Piacentini, Signor, 216
Pilgrimage to Nejd \ A, 92, 109, 11 6, 377-8
Pioneer , the, 182-3
Pinto, M. Serpa, 116
Plarr, Victor, 394

Poetical Works of Wilfrid Seamen Blunt ,
339-41

Poetry of Wilfrid Blunt, 287
Poland, 197, 270
Poles, 324

Pollen, Arthur, 230-1

M. M. Laprimaudaye, Mrs. John

Hungerford, 37, 60, 62, 230, 368
Pompey, 3 56
Pope Leo X, 159, 215-16
Porter, Father, 23-4, 27
Portsmouth, 123

5th Earl of, 153

Portumna, 237, 244-5, 2 5 2
Potocki, Count Joseph, 197, 270
Pound, Ezra, 336-8, 394
Powell, Prof. Frederick York, 286, 317,
393

Proteus , Love Bonnets of, 44, 125-9, 200 >
285, 287, 308, 339, 351, 3 76, 392
Proteus , Bonnets and Songs by, 44, 63-5,
125, 286, 376

Proteus and Amadeus , ^ Correspondence,
28, 44, 374-5
Punch , 160

Quakers, Society of Friends, 345,
39 6

‘Quatrains of Life’, 161, 339-40, 352,
3 6 S

‘Quatrains of Youth’, 287, 339-40
Queensberry, 8th Marquis of, 120
Queen Victoria, see Victoria

Ragunath Rao, Brahmin, 185
Rajputana Principalities, 186
Ram Hormuz, 108

Rashid, Emir Mohammed Ibn, 90, 94,
98-102, 1 1 2, 172, 378

RedclifFe, 1st Viscount Stratford de,
117-18

Redmond, John, 315-16, 328
Red Sea, 294, 312

Reid, Robert, later 1st Earl Loreburn,
242

Religion of Happiness, The, 318, 339, 352,
354

Reuter, 142, 161, 367
Riaz Pasha, 290-1
Ribblesdale, 4th Baron, 368-9, 373
Ripon, George, 1st Marquis of, 114, 119,
187-8, 386

Roala, tribe of the, 82-4
Robson, W. $., later Baron Robson,
242

Roche, John, 224, 240, 249
Roehampton, 26, 29, 30
Rogers, Thorold, 242
Roman Catholicism, 21-4, 26-8, 30-1,
34-8, 40, 48-9, 55, 207-8, 212,
214-16, 220-3, 22 &, 2 74j 286,

300-1, 308-9, 325, 354, 366, 371-2,
374? 386, 395

Rome, 214-16, 218, 229, 261, 368, 375
Roscommon, 222
Rosebery, 5th Earl of, 204
Rothschild, ‘Natty’, Sir Nathaniel de,
later 1st Baron, 150, 197
Rothstein, Theodore, 330, 366, 394
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 212, 282
Rowlands, James, 236-7
Ruskin, John, 267

Russell, Hon. Bertrand, later 3rd Earl,
375

Sir Charles, later 1st Baron Russell

of Killowen, 241-2
Russia, 88-9, 347
Russians, 88, 324
Ryan, Frederick, 332

Sabunji, Louis, 122, 134, 138-9, 156-60,
291

Sackville, Lady Margaret, 309, 338, 345,
369

Selected Poems by, 309
St. Albans, 10th Duke of, 116

1 2th Duke of, see Beauclerk,

Lord Osborne
St. famed s Gazette , 153
St. Winifred, 31 1
St. Winifred’s Well, 300-1, 393

INDEX

4i3

Salisbury, Robert, 3rd Marquis of, 87-8,

1 18, 200, 210, 217-18, 244, 259, 38S
Sami, Mahmud Bey, 139, 142, 179-80,
387

Suleiman Bey, 170

‘Sancho Sanchez’, 41
Sanua, James, 183
Saoud-el-Tihawi, Sheykh, 217-18
Satan Absolved, 306-9
Scawen, Capt. John, 16
Schliemann, Heinrich, 259
Schnadhorst, Francis, 242
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 353
Scotland, 29, 231-2, 268-9
‘Scramble for Africa, The’, My Diaries
l, 348

‘Secret History Series’,

Vol. I, 141, 1 76, 179, 198, 256, 318,
326, 384, 387
Vol. II, 190, 3 86
144, 283, 344, 347-9

Secret History of the English Occupation of
Egypt , The , see ‘Secret History
Series’

c Sed Nos Qui Vivimus\ 261
Senussia, the, 271, 295, 298-9
Sermoneta, Duke and Duchess of, 216
Seven Golden Odes of Arabia , The , or The
Moallakat , 317

Seymour, Admiral Sir Beauchamp, later
Lord Alcester, 159, 383
Shakespeare, 281-2

‘Shame of the Nineteenth Century, The’,
313

Shammar, Jebel, 73, 97-8, 378
tribes, 73, 77> 79> 87, no
Sharp, Cecil, 325

Shaw, George Bernard, 322-3, 393-4
Shaw-Lefevre, George, later Baron Evers-
ley, 235> 2 4z> 2 S°y 384
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14, 17, 27, 33
Sherifa, 83, 377
Sherif Pasha, 136, 142
Sheykh el Islam, 136, 152
Sheykh Obeyd, 144, 161, 217-18, 259-61,
272-4, 288, 292, 299-300, 309-10,
313-14, 319, 357, 359, 383, 391
Arab stud at, 272-3, 310, 314, 357,
360-1

Shustar, 107-8

Simla, 104, 1 12-13, I 73» 3^8

Sinai, Mount, 68-9, 310, 312

Sinai Peninsula, 68, 13 1, 161, 328
Sienkiewicz, M., 154, 382
Sirhan, the Wady, 92-4
Siwah, 271, 294, 296-300, 310
Skene, James, 72-5, 78, 81-3, 85, 377
‘Skittles’, Catherine Walters, Mrs. Bailey,
42-4, 125, 208, 21 1, 224, 284, 367-8,
375

Smyrna, 164, 325
Song of Solomon , 354

Sonnets and Songs by Proteus , see Proteus ,
Sonnets and Songs by

Sonnets of Proteus, see Proteus, Love
Sonnets of

Soudan, 191-7, 199-200, 294, 303, 385

‘Souls, the’, 280

South America, 51-2, 58, 375

Southwark, 389

Spain, 40-2, 58, 375

Spectator, the, 119

Spencer, Herbert, 306-7

Springfield House, Horsham, 16, 318

Stanley, Kate, Lady Amberley, 35-6

Henry, later 3rd Baron Stanley of

Alderley, 35

Rosalind, Mrs. Howard, see Carlisle,

Countess of
Star, the, 233
Staunton, Colonel, 68
Stead, William Thomas, 196, 198-9,
225-6, 331

Stealing of the Mare, The, 83, 283, 392
Stewart, General Sir Herbert, 199
Stillman, Mrs., 368
Stonehenge, 267-8
Stonor, Monsignor, 215
Stonyhurst, 23-6, 366, 374
Stowe, Mrs. Harriet Beecher, 56
Strachey, Sir John, 112
Stratford-on-Avon, 267, 281-2
Suakin, 199-200, 388
Suez Canal, 131-2, 150, 160, 310, 312-13,
348, 394

Sultan of Johore, 292

of Turkey, Abdul Hamid II, 81,

88, 112, 133, 138, 166, 197-9, 260,
291-3, 328, 343, 383

Pasha, 142-3, 152, 38a

Sumner, Mrs., 37

Sussex, 14-16, 45, 57-8, 258, 262, 270,
2 74; 2 77; 3 2 7; 333. 345; 354; 3 S 9;
37 2 > 395

INDEX

414

Swinburne, A. C., 286, 308, 322

Umphreville, 277

Switzerland, 29, 52, 261, 375
Syria, 69, 72, 89, 122, 13 1-2, 259, 272

Tel-el-Kebir, r6o-i, 165, 217, 381
Tennant, ‘Eddy’, Edward, later 1st
Baron Glenconner, 277
Tennants, the, 268

Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron, 302, 322,
374

Tewfik, Mohammed, see Khedive
Therapia, 34, 270
Thompson, Francis, 274, 323, 354
Tigris, 105-6, 379

Times , The , 138-40, 142, 145-6, 150, 152,
158, 162-4, 170, 180, 183, 199,

201, 204, 206, 208, 229, 258, 294,
3°3> 3°6, 308, 313, 327, 332, 380,
384, 390-1

Tolstoy, Count Leo, 311, 321
Tory Democracy, 207-8
Transvaal, the, 304

Tripoli, 271-2, 295, 331-3, 342-3, 385
‘Truth of the Dongola Adventure, The’,
294

Tudmur, 82

Tunis, 89, 133, 163, 271-2, 295, 367
Turin, 313, 318

Turkey, 88-9, 106, 117-19, 331, 342, 347?

383 , see also Constantinople
Turkish, 72, 74-5, 89, 216-18, 326, 331
Turks, 324
Tuticorn, 182, 184
Twyford on the Itchen, 20-1, 268
Tyneside Lectures, 209
Tyrrel, Father George, 308-9

Ukraine, the, 271
United Provinces, the, 186
United States of America, see America
Unwin, T. Fisher, 326
Usedom, Count and Countess d’, 38,
49

Vanity Fair, 199, 379-80, 390
Vatican, 215-16
Vefyk, Achmet, Pasha, 198
Venice, 319

Victoria, Queen, 153, 166, 185, 305, 313,
3 8 3

Vienna, 35, 46

Vincennes, 270

Vivian, Herbert, 242

Von Hiigel, Baroness Mary, 368

Wagram, Prince, 231, 264, 268-9

Princess, 268-70

Wahhabis, 98, 100, 122
Wahhabism, 378, 379
Wales, Prince of, see Edward VII, King
Walford, Edward, 29, 31-2
Wallace, Alfred Russel, 392
Wallin, G. A., 109, 378
Walsh, Dr., Archbishop of Dublin, 221,
229-30

Walters, Catherine, see ‘Skittles*

Watts, G. F., 25, 305, 307, 374
Weatherby, James, 117
Webb, Godfrey, 276, 392
Wentworth, Lady Anne Blunt, 15th
Baroness, see Blunt, Lady Anne

Hon Mrs. Neville Lytton, 16th

Baroness, see Blunt, Judith

Ada Mary, 14th Baroness, 359, 395

Wentworth, Ralph Milbanke, 13 th

Baron, see Lovelace, 2nd Earl of
Wheatley, William Frank, 58
Wilde, Oscar, 277
Wilson, Sir Charles, 164, 167

Sir Charles Rivers, 68, 89, 117, 394

President Woodrow, 343

Wind and The Whirlwind, The, 171, 306
‘Wisdom of Merlyn, The’, 261, 340, 352
Wolff, Sir Henry Drummond, 31-2,
200-1, 216-18

Wolseley, General Sir Garnet, later 1st
Viscount, 89, 150, 199-200, 383
Woodford, 224, 235-40, 244, 249-50
‘Worth Forest’, 261, 263
Worth Forest, 36-7, 45, 318, 325, 355,
357-8, 363

Worth, The Manor of, 318
Wyndham, George, 1st Baron Leconfield,
373

Rt. Hon. George, 235, 251-2, 265,

277, 280-1, 287, 300, 325-6, 334-5,
338-40, 365, 368, 373
‘The Happy Warrior’, 341

Colonel Guy, 161, 373

Madeline, Mrs. Charles Adeane, 373

Madeline Campbell, Hon. Mrs.

Percy Wyndham, 37, 302, 305, 368,
373

INDEX

Wyndham, Mary Blunt, Baroness Lecon-
field, 1 8, 2 6, 30-2, 37

Mary, Lady Elcho, later Countess

of Wemyss, 373

Pamela, Lady Tennant, later

Viscountess Grey, 373

Hon. Percy Scawen, 232, 373, 389

Percy, 334, 368, 373

4*5

Yeats, William Butler, 316-17, 336-7,
369, 394
Yemen, 122, 192
Yildiz Palace, 291-2

Zetland, 2nd Marquis of, 384
Zeytoun, 297
Zoheyr, 317